


WeGotThis

by Dame_Lazarus



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Startup, F/M, Gaming, Gen, Ping-Pong, Real Estate Porn, The Long Night, WeWork, also actual porn, but the video game version, drinking with your hot co-worker: what could go wrong?, manbuns, office romcom fluff, omg they were (storage) room mates, tech bros, there was only one couch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:08:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 43,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24158629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dame_Lazarus/pseuds/Dame_Lazarus
Summary: Game designer Brienne Tarth loves everything about her new job at Westerlands Games—except for the director of operations, Jaime Lannister, who seems to be getting paid to do no work at all. But as the scrappy startup battles a crisis just months before its version 2.0 launch, she learns that with some people, there’s more than meets the eye.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 329
Kudos: 304





	1. Just One Night

**Author's Note:**

> Quarantine strikes again! Remember going to an office? Having coworkers? Going to purchase food with a coworker? I promised I’d post this only after writing all the chapters but I am weak and so very, very indoors.
> 
> This fic is inspired by the many hours I spent in a WeWork for a grad school internship, back in the golden days of WeWork when they had lots of money and unlimited beer on tap. It is _not_ inspired by any recent knowledge of gaming or game design, aside from watching many friends play WOW and Animal Crossing.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Why are you still working at three a.m.?” he asked back. The nerve of him.

_Plink._

_Plink._

The first time Brienne heard it, she’d assumed it was part of the song she was listening to. She liked to crank cheesy bubblegum pop when she was up working late; it kept her awake. And she needed to stay alert and working as late as she could. Westerlands Games hired her last month when their designer—Design Warrior, per the official job title—jumped ship for the competition and she had to untangle all his shitty work and still meet their version 2.0 launch date six months from now. She’d have to develop the ability to not sleep to get it done. But she was determined to try.

Then the playlist ended, and it was still there.

_Plink._

_Plink._

The sound could be many things. Water dripping down to the floor from a leak in the ceiling. A fire alarm, chirping for new batteries. The sink, not all the way turned off.

_Plink. Plink. Plink._

Above all, it was certainly one thing: really freakin’ annoying.

Brienne couldn’t take it anymore. She ripped out her earbuds and pushed away from her corner of the table under the window of their glass-walled office suite. It felt positively cavernous when there weren’t five people crammed in there. She wrenched open the glass door and stepped into the hallway, its lights dimmed for the post-midnight crowd. And there, sprawled out on the floor, she found the source of the noise.

Jaime Lannister, Westerlands Games’ Director of Operations, sat up against the wall a little ways down. In one hand, he held a ping pong paddle. In the other: a tiny white ball that he was lobbing against the wall that separated the floor-to-ceiling glass door of a snacks subscription startup’s office suite from theirs. _Plink. Plink._

“Could you please stop doing that?” she asked him. He froze his hand mid-toss and turned to look at her. To stare confusedly at her, more specifically. “The sound is driving me nuts.”

“Why are you still working at three a.m.?” he asked back. The nerve of him. Jaime was technically their sixth employee, but this was the most they’d spoken or even been in each other’s presence since her interview. Even then he’d asked no questions and just stared at her, nodding his head.

“Some of us care about the 2.0 launch,” she retorted. The late hour had made her speak more sharply than she intended, but there was no denying that she had said exactly what she felt. He may have had a fancy title, but Brienne was fairly certain he did no work at all. If the CEO was anyone other than his brother, he’d have been fired long ago. “Whatare _you_ doing here this late?”

He shrugged and resumed bashing the ping pong ball on the wall next to the snack company’s door. “I like to have the space to think. And what better place than an empty WeWork at three a.m. on a Monday? Well, Tuesday, technically.”

“Perhaps your bed? Your own living room? The great outdoors?”

He just laughed.

“I just need to wrap this one design up. Please play with that in some other spot. I beg you.”

“It’s not playing,” he said crossly. “It’s my creative process.”

“Whatever! Do it somewhere else.” She stomped back into their suite and closed the door.

Brienne put her earbuds back in and hit play on her pop hits playlist. She really needed to finish these sigils for the flags of the Great Lords of the game. Players would build their homesteads on the lands of one of the great lords, and the flags were an important part of knowing who belonged where. Half of the existing sigils were too violent. Bleeding hands; men on fire. Tyrion, the CEO, wanted everything for 2.0 to be softer, cuter. If HeroAge Adventures was more adorable, it would expand the audience to younger players while still retaining their base, who took to building virtual smallhold castles and trading with knights and princesses as a form of stress relief.

Of course Bronn, her predecessor, had half-assed the updates. He had designed the originals and obviously chafed at having to make any improvements to his perfect work. Typical tech bro. She’d had enough of them to last a lifetime. Like the one currently ruining her concentration. Could you be a tech bro if you only did any real tech work on paper? He certainly had the bro part down, despite being at least ten years older than the average one. Hoodie. Skinny jeans. Ironic t-shirt. Blonde hair in a little man bun, which he pulled off annoyingly well.

_Plink. Plink. Plink._

Finally, it was too much. She slammed her laptop shut and grabbed her bag from under the table. As she walked out to the common area and away from their suite, she had to step over Jaime’s outstretched legs.

“Goodnight!” he called after her. She looked over her shoulder and gave him what she hoped was the most murderous glare.

* * *

  
Brienne paused at the elevator bank. Her feet had carried her there out of pure muscle memory. She reached out to hit the down button, out of autopilot, and then she snatched her hand back, remembering.

She wasn’t going home tonight.

Instead, she turned and trudged toward the bathroom. Let herself in with her keycard. Blinked furiously at the white overhead lights.

She pulled out her toothbrush from her bag. This plan was primarily to help her finish the work for 2.0, she told herself as she brushed her teeth. No other reason. That thing, this morning, with her roommate—that wasn’t it.

She spit the toothpaste into the sink and looked up at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were completely red and her skin looked vaguely mottled and blue. She needed to sleep. She was starting to look like a zombie.

It was time for the plan.

Most companies at their WeWork rented a storage unit in addition to their office suite. They lined the west side of each floor, a neat row of solid-walled rooms. Brienne had been in theirs a handful of times—it held a shelf of mailing supplies, some spare monitors, and several boxes of sweatshirts and hats with the Westerlands Games logo on them.

Most importantly, and most crucially to her plan: it had a couch. A love seat, really; at herabove-average height, she’d be lucky if she could fit herself on it in a fetal position. The ugly red thing had been in their main suite until Sam, their Customer Service Warrior, had spilled three takeout coffees on it. Tyrion had some plans to get a new slipcover for it, and so it had been retired to the storage unit, awaiting its makeover. But coffee stained or not, it would be a soft place to lay down in a completely dark room and actually sleep, and that’s what she needed.

She wound her way through the darkened floor, the empty offices a quiet maze of glass. Charging electronics and computers in sleep mode twinkled faintly all around. She allowed herself a nosiness she was reluctant to indulge during the workday. Some businesses had sprawling suites, rows of standing desks filling three or four times the space that Westerlands Games did. An organic bedding company called Aurora had five units, their name spray-painted in a soft gray script across thelong row of glass doors. On the other endof things were the underdogs: startups with only one or two desks inside and a single house plant standing guard. They pasted up posters face out on the glass walls, proudly advertising their wares. It was a dizzying array of nonsense words. Spici. Wunder. Humm. Butlr—that one looked like it did home robotics.

Brienne unlocked the door to their storage unit with her keycard and shut herself inside.It wasn’t too big of a space, though if it had been a closet in a King’s Landing apartment, realtors would have tried to call it a bedroom. She couldn’t bring herself to turn on the lights, so she felt her way through the pitch dark to the couch, knocking aside a few cardboard boxes on the way.

Finally: there it was. She dropped her book bag and crawled onto the couch. It smelled vaguely of coffee still, and she did have to fold herself into a little ball to fit, but it was soft and the room was dark and it felt so good to finally put her head down. She was asleep before she even could take off her sneakers.

It wasn’t to be for long.

She had barely entered REM sleep when a heavy weight fell on top of her and pulled her back awake. Gasping for air, staring up at the black room around her, she threw whatever it was off her chest.

“Fuck!” someone yelled over the sound of crumpling cardboard. Then a phone flashlight was shining in her eyes. She squinted at the person holding it.

“Tarth?” he asked. “What are you doing in here? This is my couch!”

“What?” she mumbled, still squinting and still halfway asleep. The man put the phone down on the floor, flashlight pointing up, and the room filled with a faint blue light. Her eyes adjusted a bit better.

Jaime Lannister was there. Jaime Lannister, her non-colleague, was sitting on the floor among a pile of dented sweatshirt boxes, looking incredulous. _His couch? His?_

“I can’t deal with this right now,” Brienne said. She turned toward the back of the couch, buried her face into the cushions, and went back to sleep.

* * *

Someone shook her awake what felt like only a few minutes later. Her eyes were heavy, nowhere near ready to open. She pulled herself deeper into the back of the couch. If she could have pushed herself underneath the cushions, between the cracks of the seat and the seat back, she would have.

Then came the lights. White and glaring. It might as well have been the phone flashlight in her eyes all over again.

The phone light. She rolled over on the couch. The boxes, some still crushed, pushed along the wall. And at the door: him.

“Good morning, sunshine!” Jaime chirped, leaning alongside the light switch.

She squinted at him. “Morning?”

He nodded. “It’s nine.”

She sat up in a panic. “Already?” She was appalled that she’d forgotten to set an alarm; it was only luck that she hadn’t slept later. She needed to get back to the new designs.

“Oh, calm down,” Jaime said. “You know the rest of the staff won’t be here until eleven at the earliest.” His eyes looked her up and down. “The Gap across the street opens at nine-thirty. Let’s go grab a coffee and get you a new shirt to wear.”

She looked down at her shirt. A perfectly normal gray t-shirt. What was wrong with it? It was a bit wrinkled after being slept in, but otherwise seemed totally fine. Right?

“You’ll feel more like a human if you don’t wear the same clothes for forty-eight hours,” he explained, seeing her confusion.

“How do you know I didn’t bring other clothes?”

He pointed down at her backpack, which was unzipped and spilled partly over the floor. Toothpaste. Deodorant. Computer. No clothes.

“I’ll just wear one of the sweatshirts,” she said, though it was the middle of summer. She leaned forward and plucked one out of the closest box.

Jaime sighed. “Fine. But at least let me get you a coffee. I owe you for sitting on your head last night.”

She winced. “Sorry I threw you onto the boxes.”

He rubbed at his arm. “You should be. It fucking hurt.” Then he grinned. “You can make it up to me by letting me buy you a bagel, too. Can’t have the game designer drop dead of malnutrition just before the home stretch.”

* * *

She knew the sweatshirt was a mistake as soon as she set foot outside. One second in the muggy summer air outside their building and she was already sweating.

She had intended to go out to buy _herself_ a coffee and bagel. After Jaime mentioned it, it was all she could think about. She’d only eaten free cheddar popcorn and Greek yogurts from the common room kitchen yesterday and had never quite reached the point of not being hungry. She had told Jaime, quite politely, that she could get her own breakfast and there was no need for him to come with her.

He didn’t take the hint, though. He had followed her out of the storage rooms and over to to bathrooms. When she came out after brushing her teeth and washing her face, he had been waiting for her outside, playing some game on his phone. And then he had walked alongside her over to the elevators.

“As I said, no hard feelings about last night,” she had told him as they waited for the elevator to come up to their floor. “You do not have to buy me anything.”

“If you’re going to be living here, you’ll have to at least let me show you the neighborhood,” he’d said.

“I’m not living here,” she had snapped back. “This is just a temporary thing.”

“Until we finish 2.0.”

 _We!_ She wanted to laugh again at that. “Sure. Yes.”

“Six months from now.”

Thankfully the elevator had arrived then, and full of people, too, and she didn’t need to respond.

Outside on the sidewalk, though, he picked up right where he left off.

“So, since you’ll be living here for the next six months,” he continued, “you should know that the best bagels are at Alys’s, up on the corner. Homemade and the size of your head.” He shot a bemused glance at the sweat dotting her forehead. “I think they have iced coffee, too.”

“I’m not living here for the next six months. It’s just until...just for a few days.” She was following him over to the bagel place now. She’d lost that battle.

In the blissfully cool bagel shop, they waited on a long line of people in sharp business attire. She felt kind of stupid in her Westerlands Games sweatshirt, next to Jaime in his man bun and bright blue t-shirt that said _BOING!_ on it for some reason. The tech scene in King’s Landing wasn’t as ubiquitous as out west, in Oldtown, and she felt like everyone was staring at them, the interlopers in their world of traditional wheeling-and-dealing.

“So if it’s you’re only planning to live in the office for a few days, it can’t be just about 2.0,” he said, clearly unselfconscious in all things. “So what could it be?”

“Why are _you_ sleeping in the office?” she countered. “I know you aren’t working on 2.0. No offense.”

He laughed, though with a hard edge. “Excuse me! I am working very hard. I’m playing all the storylines and looking for bugs. I keep up the castle for the House Lannister characters when tech support isn’t deploying them.”

“So you’re staying in the office so you can play our game from the comfort of the supply closet. That makes perfect sense.”

Jaime, the lucky bastard, was spared from answering her. It was their turn to order. He turned a charming smile on the young girl operating the cash register, who brushed her dark hair behind her ears and blushed. “Chocolate chip bagel with chocolate cream cheese and an iced coffee for me. And for my friend—“

“Plain with plain cream cheese,” she replied, trying not to be appalled by his selections. She didn’t even know they made chocolate cream cheese. “And another iced coffee. A very large one.”

“My friend here is going to try to pay,” Jaime said, leaning over the counter and blocking her from the register. “But I don’t like to let ladies pay for their own breakfast.” The blushing cashier took his card and giggled. Brienne wanted to roll her eyes so hard.

They stood along the back wall of the cafe to wait for their bagels, coffees in hand. The cashier kept looking over their way.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Brienne reminded him. He took a slurp of his coffee, rattling all the ice inside the cup.

“Roommate trouble,” he said, finally.

She nodded. “Me too.” Hopefully he’d leave it at that. He certainly wanted her to.

She had no such luck. “What did you do?” he asked, nonchalant.

Her stomach twisted. “What makes you think I did something?”

He grinned, an infuriating twinkle in his eyes. “Your face. You look positively tortured every time I bring it up.”

She sighed. Her father always said she concealed nothing of her feelings. _It means you’re honest_ , he’d said, ruffling her hair. _Or transparent_ , she thought now.

“I live with a married couple,” she began.

“Kinky,” he said.

She ignored him. “Anyway, yesterday morning, while I was in the shower, one of my roommates found his cat dead in my room. He was hysterical. That cat was like their child. He thought I killed him.” She could still hear Loras’s sobs ringing through the apartment— _Ser Peaches! Wake up!_ —and rushing to her room in alarm, clad only in a towel. And his face. Looking up at her, clutching the lifeless cat in his arms in the middle of her floor. _What did you do._ Once he’d taken the lifeless cat into another room, she had thrown on some clothes, grabbed a random assortment of toiletries, and fled.

“Did you?”

“Of course not!”

The cashier gleefully shook two small bags in the air at them. Well, at Jaime. He passed her one with a P written on top in black marker.

“Well,” Brienne said, walking out the door, “I do have plants in my room. I keep my door closed, so I wasn’t worried about it, but what if the cat got in, and the plants were toxic, and—“

“Even if that were true, it’s not like you did it on purpose,” Jaime said, stopping outside to flick on a pair of sunglasses. She pushed the arms of her sweatshirt up as far as they could go. The heat was unbearable. “In college, my sister’s roommate ate her cheese, so my sister scattered peanuts over the whole fridge. The girl had a peanut allergy. I spent the weekend deep-cleaning the refrigerator to keep her from taking legal action.”

“That’s...horrifying,” Brienne said. “And also possibly a felony.”

He chuckled. “And very on purpose. Unlike whatever happened to the cat. It’ll blow over. Even my sister’s roommate got over it. She was in the girl’s wedding a few summers back.”

The WeWork building loomed in front of them, all ten stories of gleaming glass facade beaming down. Jaime looked at his smart watch. Of course he had a smart watch. “It’s only ten,” he said. “Still time to get some non-corporate attire.”

A bead of sweat rolled down her back. She looked wistfully behind her at the Gap. Would Jaime follow her there too? She pictured him shadowing her on the escalator, slurping the last dregs of ice coffee from between half-melted ice cubes.

She needn’t have worried. He yawned. “I need a nap.”

“Didn’t you just wake up?”

“No,” he laughed. “You just woke up. I never went to sleep.”

“Sorry,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Thanks for breakfast?” she ventured.

The crosswalk light switched to a walk sign. He patted her on the arm. “No problem. It’s in my job description. I’m the Operations Warrior. Gotta keep the operations operating, right?”

 _Is it in your job description to annoy employees and follow them around?_ she wanted to say. But she didn’t get the chance. He was already bounding across the street and heading inside.

 _At least he‘s just regular-harassing me and not sexually harassing me_ , she thought. _For now_. Not that there would be anyone to report him to if it did get to that part. Jaime the Operations Warrior was the closest thing they had to an HR department.

* * *

Brienne had to admit Jaime was right: she did feel more human wearing fresh clothes. The brand new cotton t-shirt and underwear—along with approximately 32 ounces of iced coffee—gave her enough energy to finish all the house sigil designs and send them off to Tyrion to approve before their one o’clock staff meeting. No one had even batted an eye when she walked in at eleven. Another thing Jaime was right about.

The five of them assembled in a glass-walled conference room one hallway over just before one. They had all walked there together from the one-room office suite they shared. She appreciated Tyrion’s attempts to give them a change of scenery, inject a little structure into their workflow, but she also hated these daily meeting with a passion. They all went around reporting on their work, trying to seem busy, and then they retreated back to the office trying to get the momentum back on whatever they were doing before.

She felt more than a little guilty to complain about Westerlands, even to herself. This was Brienne’s third tech job and by far the best yet. She was the only woman, as usual, but no one mentioned it. Everyone was so far polite, if a a little awkward, like Sam, their plump and guileless Customer Service Warrior, or taciturn, like Jon,the Security Warrior who had a goth kid vibe about him, right down to the eyeliner and black nail polish. Even the Finance Warrior, Addam, who exclusively wore designer polos like something out of her high school nightmares, smiled genuinely with his very, very white teeth. 

It took her three weeks to stop doubting every fist bump or offer of a post-workday beer. At her first job, a social media site out in Oldtown, she had worked amiably alongside the guys in the design and engineering departments for almost a year before discovering that they had come up with a rating system for how ugly the girls in marketing were called the Tarth scale. (At least she herself only rated a 9 out of 10, with 10 being the ugliest. How generous of them.)

When shefinally moved to educational games company, she thought she’d finally wound up among mature adults. That was, until she found her face pasted onto porn in slack channels. That was to be her fate: not hot enough to be of use but not male enough to be taken seriously for her skills. _Women’s brains just aren’t made to handle science and math_ , her last boss Randyll Tarly said in her performance review, as an explanation why she was being reassigned to designing a ‘find the missing shoes’ app.

The next day, she’d sent in her resume to a scrappy little gaming startup on the other side of the country. She’d seen an article profiling Tyrion on an industry blog; the Westerlands Games CEO was a little person and spoke convincingly about his passion for diversity and equality.

 _If you have an opening, I’d be pleased to beconsidered._ She hadn’t expected anything to come from it. But then, only a few months later, she was being flown across the countryand hired as a Design Warrior before she could even really process what was going on. She’d found the room in Loras and his husband’s apartment online, moved in with just two suitcases’ worth of belongings, and never looked back.

It was the previous Design Warrior, whose abrupt departure had opened an escape hatch for Brienne, who dominated that day’s meeting.

“Guess who I saw on the elevator this morning?” Addam asked as they slid the conference room door shut. “Bronn fucking Blackwater.”

“What floor was he going to?” Tyrion asked. All Bronn had said when he quit—without even giving notice—is that the competition was going to pay him twice as much. Brienne tried not to be offended whenever they speculated about where he might have gone.

“We all know what floor,” Jon said darkly.

“Do we?” Thank the gods for Sam. Otherwise half the the time she’d have no idea what anyone was talking about.

“Sunspear Labs,” Addam explained. “They’re on the ninth floor. They’re the only other mobile gaming company in this building.”

“They hate us “ Tyrion said. “They asked my father for funding and he turned them down. At the time the family foundation didn’t do tech investments.”

“And then,” Addam said, gesturing to them all with wide arms. “Us.”

“Those vengeful fucks,” Tyrion spat. “Poaching our employees right on the verge of our 2.0.”

Jon and Sam shared a nervous look.

“Oh no.” Tyrion slammed his hands down on the table and leaned forward, his eyes wide. “Whatever they’ve offered you, I’ll double it.”

“Well, uh,” Addam said, “we can at least make a good faith gesture.”

“Oh!” Sam looked a little flustered. “Nothing like that. Jon and I just noticed something weird.”

“Pretty suspicious seeing as we are so close to 2.0.,” Jon added.

“I’m getting a bunch of service requests that are all the same,” Sam said. “It’s always people who haven’t logged in for a few months, and they come back to find their castles and farms destroyed and their characters...disabled.”

“Dead, basically,” Jon clarifies. “Lying on the ground, motionless. Some of them swear that the bodies are arranged into little patterns.”

“How many complaints have had you had like this?” Brienne asked. Players had the ability to go and visit each other’s smallholdings; she wondered if someone was using the game to act on some baser impulses. Internet sickos were always an occupational hazard. Then again, if they were trying to shift to being more family-friendly, a mysterious serial murderer didn’t really help things.

“Uh,” Sam said nervously. “Five?”

Tyrion breathed a sigh of relief. “Five? Probably just one dumb asshole, not a conspiracy. Track the fucker down and ban his account.” He turned to Addam. “We need to dig up everything we can on Sunspear Labs and their unreleased game. Who’s funding them, what stuff Oberyn Martell is liking on Twitter, what books Ellaria Sand is reading—everything.”

They both stood to go. I guess this meeting is over, Brienne thought.

“Did you have any comments on the sigils?” Brienne asked.

Tyrion gave her a thumbs up. “Keep up the good work. Send me the dragons and mermaids next. The most adorable mythical creatures you’ve ever seen.”

“You got it, boss,” she said, though she wasn’t sure he heard her, as he was muttering to himself about what the sunset Ned Dayne instagrammedlast Friday might mean.

Jaime wasn’t there, of course. She saw him, when she went to go drop off the bags of new clothes she’d purchased that morning: curled up on the ruined couch, fast asleep.

* * *

That night, after the rest of the staff had gone home, she took a long, luxurious shower in the endless hot water supply of the WeWork’s tenth floor gym. Tyrion had purchased the whole staff all-access passes; she wondered now if the gesture was less about encouraging wellness and more about encouraging good hygiene. 

Cute mythical creatures. She could do that.She was excited to do that. Dragons, mermaids, friendly giants. Maybe unicorns. She had spent the afternoon sketching out all the different faces for her dragon design: happy, sad, curious, angry (but in a toddler sort of way.) They would have them in three color: purple, gold, and blue. Once she got the prototypes up and running, she and Tyrion could encode them for the game and get 2.0 out to beta testers. Tyrion wanted them to be non-playing characters, just like the villagers who ran the blacksmith shops and taverns or the lords who issued high decrees. If a player was traveling from one part of the kingdom to the other, the dragon might fly down to offer advice or demand gold for them to pass. A mermaid might swim by on the river or offer freshly caught pearls to a lucky smallholder.

This was the fun part. And the last big design hurdle, according to Tyrion. Brienne could take her time. She could treat the rest of the run-up to 2.0 like this shower: leisurely.

But she couldn’t. _Maybe it just was how she was built_ , she reasoned as she shaved her legs. She was a fighter, a worker, a perfectionist. She demanded the best of herself. And that meant she couldn’t leave it alone. They had asked her to redesign uniforms and sigils, to create dragons and mermaids. But what they really needed her to do was to re-do the humans.

Bronn had made an attempt at upgrading the characters to a cuter look before he left. They had big anime eyes and soft lines; gone were the wrinkles from their faces and the realism of their scowls. But there was still something off about them. They weren’t cartoony enough. Their eyes had a dead-eyed robotic sheen to them. She knew it would give Tyrion a heart attack if she proposed to re-do almost all the design and animation work with only six months left. And it shouldn’t matter. He was the boss and he thought it was fine. But she could make it better, and she knew it.

Finally being clean invigorated her even more than the fresh clothes did. She dressed in more new clothes and she rode the elevator back down to their floor, ready for round two.

Plenty of people still milled around the common area, though it was nearing nine in the evening. Two guys in baseball caps were chortling over a game of ping-pong; another guy stood at the end of the counter with his headphones on, tapping something out on his phone and nursing a free pint of beer from the built-in self-service taps. She caught a glimpse of Jaime in a plush red armchair as she walked through, absorbed in a game of _Dance of the Dragons_ on his laptop. She waved, but he didn’t look up. At least she knew he’d leave her alone for the time being.

Someone had left a catering-sized tray of chips and guacamole in the kitchenette. _Help yourself! XOXO_ , a note in front of the food read. She loaded up a paper plate. Now she wouldn’t have to go out for dinner and waste more time away from the computer.

She drew different angles of dragons and mermaids for what felt like hours. Slowly the lights in the common areas dimmed and the voices of other people in the neighboring offices faded away. Her eyes felt like sand. She checked the time on her laptop’s clock. _1:25 a.m_. She could put on some music and try to psych herself through it. Get one more hour of work done.

Or she could just go to sleep.

She didn’t want a repeat of the other night. _This is my couch!_ It made her cringe just to think about it. And she certainly couldn’t go back to her apartment just yet. So she did the only sensible thing she could think of: she turned off the overhead lights, balled up her Westerlands Games sweatshirt under her head, and lay down on the office floor.

 _It’s just one more night_ , she told herself as she drifted off to sleep.

* * *

_Plink._

_Plink._

_Plink._

Brienne was having a nightmare. She was sleeping on a sheet of sandpaper, stretched over a beach made of rocks. Over her head, someone tossed a rock against a concrete wall. _Wake up_ , they insisted. She wanted to get up, but her joints were locked in place.

 _Plinkplinkplink_.

Brienne opened her eyes. She wasn’t on sandpaper on the rocky beach. She was lying on the floor of their WeWork, face inches from the glass door on their office suite. And no one was throwing rocks. Someone was sitting on the other side of the door, tapping an empty cup on the glass opposite her eyes.

That someone was Jaime Lannister, of course.

She saw up so they were eye to eye. She squinted a bit and rubbed her eyes. He smiled and waved cheerily.

“Can I come in?” he asked, his voice slightly raised to carry through the door.

“Don’t you have a key?” she shouted back.

He clambered to his feet and awkwardly pulled out his ID card from his pocket with one finger to open door. She almost jumped up to help him, out of instinct, but instead she stayed where she was, staring up at him as he walked in. His jaw was annoying chiseled at this angle, covered with a dusting of light-blonde stubble. He held a brown glass jug in one hand and a metal cup in the other.

“Guess you didn’t solve your cat murder problem,” he said, putting the items onto the bare corner of desk where Tyrion usually sat.

“I didn’t murder any cats,” she protested.

“Ah, yes, right. Cat manslaughter, then.”

“You know, the storage unit is free, since I’m sleeping in here,” she pointed out.

“This is a terrible place to sleep,” he said. “There are lights on, and all of the nocturnal Operations Warriors wandering the halls can see you. Plus I never got around to getting a pad to go under that rug.”

She rolled her shoulders. “I noticed.”

He took the metal cup and poured something into it. “Here,” he said, handing it to her. It was beer, she realized, but with a slightly fruitier scent than the kind they served on their floor.

She meant to refuse, ask what he’d drink out of, but he already had the mouth of the jug to his lips.

“Blueberry Morning Ale, from the fifth floor keg. It tastes like blueberry pancakes andmaple syrup. I always fill my growler up when they get it in. Try it. It’s amazing.”

It was: like breakfast and dessert all at once.

“Why are you being so nice to me?” she asked. “I’ve kind of been a dick.”

He chuckled and took another swig from his growler. “You’ve only been honest. I’ve seen worse dick behavior from my own family.”

She hoped that was a joke, but the serious look on his face told her it wasn’t. “Still.”

He shrugged. “I wish I were more like you. Driven. Talented. Passionate. I had those things, once. I wanted to study game design,make the next Dance of the Dragons. My dad said he’d only pay for business or pre-med, and if I dropped out instead, I’d be cut off for good. After college I did one of those bootcamp programs. It was awful. I was the dumbest person in the room. I quit after two weeks.”

“They always treat you like that, in this business.”

“My brother doesn’t.”

“No,” she agreed. “He doesn’t. It’s great, actually. This is the first job I’ve had where everyone on the staff isn’t an ass.”

“Just the one ass, then,” he said, pointing at himself.

“To be fair, you’re barely on the staff,” she replied. That earned her a real laugh, one that made him tip back his head and bare histanned throat.

“I’m only here as a figurehead. My father wouldn’t have given Tyrion the funding for this.He thinks I’m running things behind the scenes, coming up with all the business plans. Ready to take up the role of the next Lannister family mogul.”

“Seems like Tyrion is already doing that.”

“Oh, he’s a natural. The smartest of the three of us kids. My father won’t see it. He’s resented Tyrion since the day he was born.”

“Because of—because of how he looks?” She couldn’t imagine it, in this day and age.

“Partly. He’s not an enlightened man. But my mother died giving birth to my brother. I think that’s the real reason.”

He stopped speaking then. Brienne looked intently into her drink. Her mother had passed away when she was younger, too, but she always had her father there. She couldn’t imagine growing up like Tyrion had, feeling hated and abandoned. But she didn’t voice any of this to Jaime. They were already getting dangerously close to taking about their feelings, and Brienne wasn’t good with feelings. Not real, deep ones, going back to childhood like that.

“Hey,” she said, suddenly struck with inspiration for a new subject of conversation, “you play _Dance of the Dragons_ , right? Will you look at my dragon?”

She unplugged her computer and pulled it down to her lap. He sank onto the floor next to her, a light smile on his lips.

She opened up her sketches from earlier in the day. “Tyrion wants the 2.0 to have a cuter look,” she explained. He nodded.

“This is great,” he said. “I like the colors. You do this all with a stylus?”

She nodded. “You don’t think it’s too cute?”

He shrugged. “Is that possible? You could give one of them a bigger wingspan, if you want. Makes them more...impressive, I think.”

He had a point. Maybe she’d only have one dragon with the smaller wings, actually. One extra-cute and two impressive-cute.

“Have you seen any of the other designs from 2.0? From before I started.” He shook his head, so she opened up their cloud server and rooted around until she found the prototypes for the villagers and the player characters. She opened up the Lord and Lady Frey, the owners of an impressive castle at the crossroads of a mountain pass.

“Yikes,” Jaime said. “Not cute at all.”

“Yes! Thank you. Tyrion’s gonna kill me, but I’m going to propose at our staff meeting tomorrow that I redo them. We can’t have half the game looking like this.”

“Well, then,” he said, standing up, “you’d better get your rest, Design Warrior.” He offered her his hand. “To the barracks with you.”

She stared at his outstretched hand for a second before offering her own. He pulled her to her feet with a strong, warm grip. “Where will you sleep?” she asked him.

“I told you—I’m nocturnal,” he said, laughing. He capped the growler shut. “Don’t worry about me.”

“Okay. I guess I’ll see you—do you consider the morning your morning, or your evening?”

He shrugged. “What is time, really, when you rarely go anywhere outside these walls? Sleep tight, Warrior.” He started toward the door, then looked back. “You’ve got something on your shirt, by the way.”

She looked down at her shirt. There, right on the front of her left breast, was one of those round little stickers stores used to indicate the size.

 _XS_ , it read. Great. She felt her whole face get hot. That wasn’t even the right size for this shirt. She hadn’t been a size XS since fourth grade and now she just had a whole late-night conversation with an attractive man, wearing a label proclaiming her boobs to be extra small.

If Jaime hadn’t left the suite already, she wouldn’t have been able to look him in the eye. She balled up the sticker, threw it in the trash can, and then grabbed her backpack to go get ready for bed. To the barracks, indeed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact: the peanut-fridge-revenge incident really happened in my college friend’s girlfriend’s apartment. We watched that apartment all of junior and senior years like *popcorn emoji*
> 
> Bronn’s designs are based on MeMoji. Unsettling as fuck!


	2. Some Good Points

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two guys stared at each other across a very serious game of ping-pong. Any game of ping-pong at eight-thirty in the morning would be absurd, but the tension in this one made it even more so. One player had his back to her, but she could see his arrogance writ in the right sleeves of his plain white t-shirt and gelled dark hair. The other player she could see plainly: Jaime Lannister, his hair pulled back in its neat blond bun, his eyes narrowed with what she could only describe as pure fury.

Tyrion stood at the head of the conference room table and cleared this throat. “We have a lot to cover today,” he said, “so let’s start with—Jaime!”

“I’m not that interesting, I assure you,” Jaime said, shutting the glass door behind him. Everyone turned to stare at him. Who knows how long it had been since Jaime turned up to a staff meeting. He certainly had never attended any during Brienne’s brief tenure.

“Is everything...ok?” Addam asked, his bottle of kombucha frozen mid-way to his mouth.

Jaime sat down at the table, his arms crossed on the shiny veneer surface, and furrowed his brow. “Don’t we have a staff meeting? Why are you all looking at me like that?” 

His eyes slid over to Brienne’s and she willed her herself not to go all red in the face. She had already been cursing herself all morning for spending so much time the night before thinking about how good-looking he was. Worrying if he had been looking at her boobs. Like a fifteen year old. She tried not to think about how he was technically sitting next to her. His chair was more than an arm’s width away and, furthermore, it was the only one left. Nothing to read into it. Not that she wanted to, or should be.

“Right,” Tyrion said, and she refocused her gaze on him. “So we do. Well. I was thinking that we could go around and update each other on what we’re doing for 2.0.” He looked over at Jaime. “That’s version 2.0, of the game. It’s a major upgrade, including a design overhaul and new storylines.”

“I know that, Tyrion. I do read the annual reports that we send to Dad and the foundation under my name,” Jaime said.

Tyrion smiled, but it didn’t really reach his eyes. 

“Brienne, maybe you should start,” Addam offered.

She swiveled her laptop screen to face the rest of the staff. “I finished the design for the dragons,” she said, pulling up the sketches of the purple and gold creatures, spreading their wings mid-flight, joy and mirth and cartoon rage on their faces.

“They’re fantastic,” Sam said, as she flipped through the different poses. Addam nodded enthusiastically. Even Jon inclined his head, a slight half-smile on his face, which Brienne felt was a great victory.

Tyrion clapped his hands together. “Perfect. Now we just need names for them.”

“Francis,” Sam volunteered. Everyone looked at him with varying expressions of befuddlement. He tried again. “Richard?”

“Do the dragons have to be male?” Brienne asked. “Anyway, there’s plenty of time to think of names.” She took a deep breath. “I’d like to discuss my next design project for 2.0.”

“Yes! The mermaids,” Tyrion said.

“Well, I was thinking of something else. I know that before I started, Bronn completed new designs for the players and villagers, but it seems to me that they should be consistent with the rest of my designs.”

Tyrion shook his head. “They are consistent enough. We need you to focus on finishing the undesigned parts of the game.”

“I agree with Brienne,” Jaime said. “Have you _seen_ Bronn’s designs?”

Tyrion glared at his brother. “Of course I’ve seen them, Jaime. I had to approve them and work on getting the animation coded into the game.” He turned to Brienne, extending his hand on the table toward her. “I appreciate your dedication to the overall look of the game, but we just don’t have time for that.”

“It won’t take me away from completing the new elements we’ve already planned,” Brienne said quickly. “I’ll work around the clock to get the work done by the deadline if I have to.”

“Pull up some of the designs to show everyone,” Jaime said to her, leaning closer and gesturing toward her computer. _Please don’t say ‘like you did last night_ ’, she silently pleaded as she pulled up the cloud server again, keeping her gaze on the paths of folders unfurling on the screen.

“I hardly think that’s necessary,” Tyrion said. “We already approved them. And we still have to cover other things before Addam and I have to leave for our 2:30 with the _Kingsguardian_.”

“It will just be a few minutes,” Brienne said, turning the screen out to everyone, Lord and Lady Whent staring vacantly at the room, their metallic lips hanging loosely open. “Here.”

The room fell awkwardly silent. Brienne looked out the corner of her eye to see Jaime leaning back, hands behind his head and a smirk on his face. 

“Bronn wasn’t the best at taking criticism,” Addam said finally.

“Maybe Brienne could just tweak the designs a little,” said Sam.

“Or completely,” Jaime suggested. Tyrion glared at him again. Jaime seemed not to notice. Or not want to.

“I’ll just do some preliminary sketches,” Brienne promised. “It won’t set us back at all.”

“That doesn’t sound like it will do us any harm,” Addam said, more to Tyrion than anyone else. “And she makes some good points about a consistent design.”

Tyrion nodded his head, barely, his lips in a thin line. Still, giddiness rose in her chest. She sat back in her chair, not trying to smile too much.

“Anything else?” Tyrion asked. He looked down at his smartwatch with a frown, though the clock on Brienne’s laptop showed that only a half hour had passed. 

“The incidents,” Jon said. 

“Have there been more?” Tyrion sounded exhausted all of a sudden.

“Dozens. All at night on the east coast, on users who aren’t logged on.”

Jaime leaned forward. “What’s this?”

“If you’d been here yesterday, you’d know,” Tyrion chided.

“Someone is killing off users’ characters in the night,” Sam explained. “Sometimes they do weird things with the bodies. Patterns.”

“And no one’s seen who it was?” Jaime asked. Sam shook his head.

“Yes, well,” Tyrion said, “send me an email recap. Addam—we’d better be going. Can’t keep the _Kingsguardian_ waiting. A good plug from them will be great for 2.0.”

Addam looked down at his watch, but stood up to follow Tyrion out of the room without saying a word.

“You should try the boards,” Jaime said. “The users probably have a theory already about who is doing it.”

“Tried that,” Jon said. “They don’t.” 

“Send me a pic of the dead users, then,” Jaime implored. “I’d like to take a look.” Sam and Jon nodded, but their faces looked more indulgent than serious. They wouldn’t send the picture, Brienne knew.

“Jaime,” Brienne said, perhaps a bit too quickly, standing to leave the meeting, “thank you for backing me up on the designs.”

He looked up at her from his chair, leaning back with his hands behind his head again. “No sweat, Warrior.” 

She scurried out of the room before her face could give away her feelings about that look even more that it probably was already.  
  


* * *

  
Six hours and just as many cups of coffee later, Brienne had a template face and body design and a body practically vibrating with a heart-pounding energy. She scarfed down a bag of vending machine white-cheddar popcorn and a cold slice of leftover pizza from the kitchen, her foot violently tapping on the floor under the table in their suite. She wouldn’t get anything else done in this state.

She changed, quickly, in the storage room, into leggings and a tank top with some sort of bra built into it. She’d planned to save them to wear as pajamas, when she bought them. Guess she’d just have to wear the same rumpled set to bed that she wore last night, she thought, ruefully, which was ridiculous, as if sleeping was a fashion show. She laced up her sneakers with caffeine-addled hands and headed to the WeGym on the 10th floor.

She hadn’t been in here a ton. There just hadn’t been time; if she wasn’t working, she was commuting. Now she was just doing one of those things, so she was out of excuses. Unlike the lower floors, cluttered with glass offices in varying sizes, the gym was open and airy. Rows of treadmills faced the floor-to-ceiling windows all along the perimeter, nearly all of them packed with very serious runners. She watched the sweat-stained backs, a smattering of bouncing ponytails among them; just the sight of them and the furious pounding of their feet made her feel winded.

A man to her left let out an obscene groan, throwing a heavy barbell to the padded floor with a metallic flourish. Brienne jumped, and he laughed, big and throaty. She looked over at him, his body thick with curly orange hair and his muscles bulging out of a loose, sweaty tank top. If the shirt hadn’t read _Hound Dog — Fuel for the Future,_ she’d have thought him out of place in a building made up mostly of start-ups.

“Like what you see?” he said, grinning.

Brienne fled for an open treadmill on the other side of the room. She punched the buttons randomly until it was up and running and she along with it, the dusty blue light of early evening spreading out over the city before her.

The man’s fuzzy reflection loomed into her line of vision. He was doing squats, but she thought he was mostly standing behind her and looking at her ass. She looked over her shoulder and gave him a very displeased look. _I know what you’re doing._ He grinned at her again and wiggled his eyebrows. She turned toward the window and counted the lights in the apartment buildings across the way. She stared past him into the windows of the Gap, customers weaving in and out of clothing racks, looking anywhere but him.

He grunted again, and she turned the speed up on the treadmill, hoping the whirring of the belt would drown him out.

Another muscle-y man in a matching Hound Dog tank, swarthier and much less hairy, lumbered over and smacked the red-headed leerer hard on the shoulder. “Fuck, man,” he said, “you trying to get us bad press before we even launch? Leave the girl alone.”

“I’m just doing squats,” the creeper said. “Like the view on this side of the room.” The other man grabbed him roughly by the arm and dragged him away. “Just as good of a view on this side,” she heard him say. Brienne tried to catch his eye, nod her head in thanks, but he was already looking elsewhere. Brienne slowed the pace on her treadmill, her legs and lungs aching, and she settled into a brisk walk. She hadn’t even stopped to put on her headphones.

“The gym here is always a battlefield,” a woman called out to her from a few treadmills over, barely stopping her quick strides or turning her head. Her curly dark hair wound artfully in a knot on top of her head, and her olive-skinned arms glistened lightly with sweat as if she had only misted herself with a spray bottle. 

Brienne realized she had been leaning rather heavily forward on the treadmill rails and pulled herself up straighter. “It certainly is,” she replied.

“I’m Ellaria,” the woman said, still running gracefully. It was then that Brienne saw her tank top logo reflected in the glass. A sun impaled on a pike. Sunspear Labs. She must have missed the memo about working out in company swag.

“Brienne. With Westerlands Games.”

The woman arched a brow and smirked at her reflection. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” Her voice did not match the sentiment. She didn’t sound pleased at all. “We ladies have to stick together.”

Brienne nodded back, one stiff motion to Ellaria’s reflection rather than her face. A woman like that never was a part of a _we_ with anyone; she didn’t need to be. Brienne turned off the treadmill. She watched her feet as it slowed and as she walked out of the gym and to the hall, away.

The women’s locker room never had many people in it. The past few days, when she’d been up to shower, only one or two other people were in there, milling about, wringing their hair dry, staring down at their phones. That night, the blue-tiled room, made dark by its rows of shiny blue lockers, was completely empty. If one lone shower wasn’t running, she was certain that her steps would echo overhead. 

She changed quickly out of the clothes, setting them in the locker with her phone and wrapping herself in a free white towel that barely covered her ass. Thank heavens no one was here to see her. She felt silly locking her things up, what with no one around, but she heard her father’s voice as she pushed the combination lock closed: _you’re in the big city—never can be too careful._

She padded over to the showers, slowing herself over puddles of water on the floor as she drew closer. Her bare feet curled against the clammy, cold tile. This is how people get weird foot things from the gym, she thought, making a mental note to buy flip flops if she was going to keep up this whole ‘public shower’ thing.

The water shut off and Brienne heard the curtain slide back before she reached the doorway leading to the row of showers. There, she was greeted by not another woman who thought _we ladies should stick together_ , but a completely naked man, humming to himself. He was thankfully facing away from the door, but he must not have heard her coming, because he just stood there, forcing her to stare at the water running down his backside, toweling off his hair and singing. Must these men be everywhere? Nowhere in this building was safe, it seemed.

Brienne cleared her throat. “Hello?”

That seemed to do the trick. The man jumped a little in shock and wrapped the towel around his waist. He turned to face her, running a hand through his hair, and—oh, of course it was. Him. Brienne felt her whole face heat up.

“Brienne!” Jaime said, as if this was a casual encounter in a hallway in which they were both fully clothed. “What a coincidence.”

“This is the women’s locker room,” she said, pulling her towel tighter around her body. 

“So it is,” he replied. “I always shower here. The first month I used the men’s, like a good little boy, but the lines to shower were terrible, and the conversations, ugh—“

“The first _month_? How long have you been living here?”

He shrugged. “A few months. Nothing major.”

She compelled herself to look him directly in the eyes. “Is that even allowed?”

He laughed. “Allowed? Brienne, I think it’s practically the point. WeWork. WeGym. WeFood. WeLiveHere.”

She rolled her eyes. “I think they do want us to leave on occasion.”

“For someone so interested in those rules, you seem to have been breaking them for what...three days now?” he pointed out. 

“This is temporary,” she said, for what felt like the millionth time. “I need to shower, if you’ll excuse me.” She walked past him to the shower one over from the one he had used, trying valiantly not to glance over at him. 

“The new shampoo they put in there is great,” he called, as she pulled the curtain closed. She slipped out of the towel and hung it outside, and let the water run cool over her burning skin.

* * *

  
The shower and run, as short as it was, left her feeling drained and calmer. The assurance in the Sunspear woman’s face has burrowed into her chest. She could see why Tyrion worried. They hadn’t even released anything, and she could easily dismiss them as fakers and posers. But Ellaria was so naturally composed, so effortlessly driven—it was evident in her assured run, her barely-there signs of exertion. These were people with their eyes on the prize.

The internet had plenty of articles on Sunspear Labs. They specialized in mobile games, like Westerlands, but were developing a proprietary technology to compress the game to deliver more complex roleplay while taking up less memory and storage space. The game was called Trial by Combat, and would feature one on one and group gameplay. Aside from that, though, they were very tight-lipped about the game itself. The woman from the gym, Ellaria Sand, was a developer in her own right, but she also served as the company’s spokesperson. Public relations was an easy place to park a female employee at a tech company, but it was clear that Ellaria was doing it because she had a knack for it: she was witty, wise, and poised in every interview and press statement. She wondered if Ellaria Sand was googling Brienne from Westerlands Games right now with equal curiosity. _Probably not_ , she thought.

Brienne turned back to the designs with a renewed sense of purpose, a fire in her blood. Sunspear might be positioning itself as the next big thing in multi-player mobile games, but Westerlands wasn’t going anywhere. 

It was well into the small hours of the night when Brienne admitted to herself that she needed to sleep. She had a solid repertoire of smallfolk and high lord designs and, feeling a rush of sleep-deprived pettiness, emailed them all to Tyrion to approve. 

2:47 am, the time stamp on the email read. _I was serious about putting in the time, boss._

She was surprised to see a strip of light blazing out the bottom of the storage closet door as she walked up. She stepped inside, warily; if Jaime was in there, she could just take her pajamas and go. Fast.

He was in there, after all: fast asleep, curled up on the couch under a thin blue blanket. A sleep mask with cartoon googly eyes covered his face. The room was completely rearranged. All the sweatshirt boxes were pushed along the walls and up against the supply shelf. Some leaned a bit too precariously in their stacks; Brienne would have to fix that later. But not now. There was more. In the center of the floor, where the boxes once lay, sat a plump twin-sized air mattress. A second blue blanket was folded up in a neat square on top. 

Brienne didn’t know what to think. She stepped forward, almost to shake Jaime awake and insist he take the bed, but she stopped herself. There would be time for that tomorrow. He looked peaceful, despite the ridiculous mask, his hands folded up under his cheek like a cherub in an old Myrish painting.

Instead, she crept around the air mattress to her pile of clothes, straightened up but left mostly undisturbed. Keeping her eyes firmly on Jaime to ensure his mask stayed where it was, she shed her work clothes and dressed in pajamas. She nestled her backpack near the head of the bed and tiptoed over to turn out the lights.

In the dark, she slid herself onto the bed, hearing the rubber creak against the cement floor. There was no sheet, but the top of the air mattress had a fine fuzzy coating, almost like velvet, and it was soft enough. She pulled the blanket up to her chin—she’d been wanting one, with the air conditioning on full blast—and laid back, exhaustion washing over her. 

“Good night, Warrior,” Jaime said, rather loudly, from his place on the couch. “Sweet dreams of my ass in your future?”

“Please go to sleep, Jaime,” she replied, though she felt her face break into a smile in the dark.  
  


* * *

  
She woke alone to her phone going off the following morning, blaring like a foghorn in the dark little room. The sound she’d selected for the automatic 8-o’clock alarm was so obnoxiously unpleasant that she was certain Jaime would have let her know his thoughts on it if he was there. After the near-miss the first night, she wasn’t taking the chance of oversleeping.

A check with her phone light confirmed it: the only thing on the couch was a wadded-up blanket. She turned the light to face the ceiling, like Jaime did that first night, dressing in the dim blue-white glow and allowing her eyes to adjust. She stared down at the air mattress. She couldn’t just leave it there on the floor, evidence of the ridiculous turn her life had taken. Plus, it was probably a safety hazard. Yet, she wasn’t sure she wanted to deflate it, either; then she would have to re-inflate it, and it was so nice to just collapse on the bed when she was tired. 

In the end, she settled on nestling the fully inflated mattress between the couch and the wall. If no one had an urge to push the couch up against the wall, it would be fine. She placed the folded-up blanket on top of her dwindling pile of clean clothes and stepped out of the storage room into the brightly lit hallway, blinking like a creature fresh out of hibernation.

The floor wouldn’t come alive for a few hours yet, though Brienne spotted a few people already ensconced within their glass offices, turning on computers and nursing travel mugs of coffee. The bathroom, thankfully, was empty. She spread her things across the whole side of the sink and brushed her teeth, avoiding the mirror. Finally, though, it was unavoidable. In the white light that reflected off the black-tiled walls and futuristic metal fixtures, she could see the faint purple swathes under her eyes and the tiny red lines spreading within them. 

She splashed cold water on her face and dried it with a rough paper towel. Her hair looked insane, too; the short bits at the back of her neck had dried in two completely different directions, and she knew she couldn’t even see the worst of the damage. She ran wet fingers on it and then packed up as quickly as possible. She was just going to sit at the computer for fifteen hours. It didn’t matter what she looked like. 

Brienne trudged to the kitchenette to get a mug of coffee. The free stuff here was never good and whoever made it liked it way too strong, but it would save her time and that’s what she needed most of all right now. 

The scene in the common room just beyond the kitchen was nothing like what she expected. Usually there were people there, sure—someone eating a bagel at one of the small tables; a guy sprawled on one of the couches staring intently at his laptop. But that morning, there was a group of six or seven, large enough to be considered a crowd, huddled around the ping-pong table.

Brienne usually cursed her height. Being taller than most guys made them often afraid to approach her, as friends or otherwise. She could never find clothes that fit her—a calf-length dress on her was a knee-length one, and all jeans became capris, unless they were men’s, in which case they emphasized all the wrong things. But in cases like this, crowds and concerts and faraway distances, she could easily see what everyone else could not.

Two guys stared at each other across a very serious game of ping-pong. Any game of ping-pong at eight-thirty in the morning would be absurd, but the tension in this one made it even more so. One player had his back to her, but she could see his arrogance writ in the right sleeves of his plain white t-shirt and gelled dark hair. The other player she could see plainly: Jaime Lannister, his hair pulled back in its neat blond bun, his eyes narrowed with what she could only describe as pure fury.

Jaime served the ping-pong ball over the net, and the man on the other side lobbed it back with a controlled flick of his wrist. Jaime lunged to his right to block the ball. It sailed diagonally across the table and narrowly missed his opponent’s head, bouncing lightly on the hardwood floor. 

“That’s another point for me, Martell,” Jaime said, a cocky smile on his face. 

“Feel good actually winning at something, Lannister?” The man—Oberyn Martell, the Sunspear CEO, Brienne realized—picked up the ball and positioned himself at the center of his side of the table.

Jaime chuckled, a performative noise at the back of his throat. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

Oberyn served the ball lightly over the net. “Of course you do. We all know that you’ve only here because your family feels bad for you and you couldn’t get a job anywhere else. Word is that you nearly failed out of the business program at Riverlands. You barely made it two weeks at the Oathkeeper Academy bootcamp.”

Jaime sent the ball back without saying anything. He was no longer smiling.

“Or maybe it’s something else,” Oberyn continued, blocking the ball on his right side. “I heard other things from my friends in your year at Riverlands too. That you were close with your twin sister. Like creepy close.” 

He deflected another serve from Jaime, this one fast and violent. “Maybe your dad set you up here so you would be too busy to keep cockblocking your sister. Or too busy to be doing something else.”

Jaime slammed his paddle down on the table. The ball skidded past him and into the small crowd. “What the fuck did you just say to me?” He advanced toward Oberyn, eyes flashing. The other man leaned away, his hand gripping the edge of the table.

Brienne put down her coffee mug and rushed across the room. “Jaime!” she called. He looked up at her, startled. He hadn’t noticed her staring across the room. Oberyn turned his head to face her, too, as did the group of guys assembled to watch. 

Brienne put her hand on Jaime’s shoulder. “I’ve been looking for you,” she said, pulling him lightly toward her. “I need to show you something important.”

Jaime looked down at her hand, and then back at Oberyn, coolly. Then he nodded and walked toward Brienne. She dropped her hand and turned, leading him out of the common area and over to the elevator bank.

“What did you need to show me?” He asked. She shoved him lightly into an open elevator and pressed the button for the lobby.

“How to not get your ass kicked,” she said, as the doors closed. 

“I could have taken Martell,” he huffed.

“Maybe,” she replied, “but should you? That’s the last thing your brother needs. ‘Westerlands Games COO charged with assault after attacking Sunspear Labs CEO over a game of ping-pong.’

He leaned back against the elevator wall and said nothing. He continued to say nothing as Brienne pulled him out of the building and into the street, leading him down the block to the line almost out the door of Alys’s Cafe. She would have liked having shut him up, a few days ago, but now his silent compliance was unsettling.

“Of course, we both know it wasn’t about ping-pong,” she said to him.

“No. It was about Oberyn being an asshole. He has his damn funding. He doesn’t need to go around still being pissed off that we didn’t give him anything.”

“Maybe he feels it’s personal,” she said. “Since he got so...personal up there.”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “Just ask me. I know you want to.”

“About what?”

“The stuff he said. Failing out. My sister.”

“He’s just being an asshole, like you said. And anyway, it’s none of my business.”

“I’m not fucking my sister,” he hissed. The woman in line in front of them gave them a horrified look out of the corner of her eye.

“Okay,” Brienne said. “Most people aren’t.”

“We were always together. Roommates, in college and then here. We’re twins. We’re close. We had a secret language as kids. I can tell what she’s thinking just by looking at her. Some people think it’s weird. But that’s just how we are.”

“And yet, you’ve been hiding out at the WeWork for months.” Roommate trouble, he’d said. 

“Yes, well. She’s a lot.” Brienne remembered the story about the peanuts. “I just needed a break,” he said. 

They reached the cashier, the same blushing girl as before. She wasn’t as happy to help Brienne as she had been for Jaime, as Brienne placed their order, the same one as before. She certainly couldn’t forget Jaime’s gross chocolate-on-chocolate bagel preference. Jaime held out his debit card without a word. Brienne would have fought him, but she realized that she had left her wallet upstairs in all the clamor.

They pressed against the wall, among the crowd of customers waiting for their orders. Brienne tried to change the subject. “What was Oberyn Martell doing on our floor anyway? I thought the Sunspear offices were on nine.”

“That’s how this whole thing started,” Jaime said. “He and his buddy Dayne were playing ping-pong when I went in there for some water. Bizarre. Who gets to work early for a game of ping-pong on a different floor?”

“Maybe they were capping off an all-nighter, and wanted us to know about it,” Brienne suggested.

“Or they were hoping to get some intel,” he said. “Or start some drama.”

“At which they succeeded,” Brienne reminded him. Jaime didn’t respond. Instead, he leaned against the wood-paneled wall in complete silence, again, until his name was called with their order. 

Brienne claimed a table on the far wall, away from the windows, while he went up for the food. He clearly didn’t expect it, because he came over to her with the coffees in a carry-out tray and the bagels in a string-handled paper bag and a furrow in his brow.

“It’s only nine-thirty,” she told him. “You know no one’s going to be in the office until eleven, at the earliest.” He smiled a little at that, and sat down on the stool opposite her.

“Cersei pushed the girl I was seeing down the stairs of our apartment building,” he said as he unwrapped his bagel.

“She’s fine,” he added, looking up at her. Her mouth was hanging slightly open, she realized. “Though she did dump me right after. Cersei said it was an accident, but—I don’t believe her. She never liked Melara. She doesn’t like when I date people she doesn’t know. She likes to set me up with her boyfriend’s friends. Or their sisters. One time, we dated another pair of brother-sister twins. She was furious when I broke things off with that girl. But it was too weird. They lived together, too. Every date was with my sister there. One time we were both spending the night there and all fucking at the same—“

“I get it,” Brienne interrupted. 

“She’s not a bad person,” Jaime said, swallowing a bite of his bagel. “After our mother died, our father wasn’t around. She was afraid of losing anyone else. Of things changing too much. I know I need to be there for her, but I just needed a break.”

“My mother died when I was a kid, in a car accident.” She swallowed too, hoping he didn’t look up. That day was years ago, and she had cried all her tears over it, but when it came back to her out of nowhere, it still felt like a slap on the face. “I didn’t push anyone down the stairs over it.” 

Jaime did look up. His eyes were round and so green. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Look, I don’t have any siblings,” she said. “I guess I don’t really understand. But when I got into college in Oldtown, my dad told me not to turn it down just because it was far away. I nearly did; I felt guilty about leaving him alone. He said that neither he nor my mother would want to see me give up on living the life I wanted to live. We only have one life, he told me, and we have to make the most of it. You don’t seem like you’re living the life you want to live. You seem like you’re living the life other people want you to live.”

He recoiled back. “What do you know about my life?”

She sighed and pulled her eyes away from him, to look at anything else. The steel fans on the ceiling. The chalkboard over the register with a list of all the bagel flavors. “Nevermind. Nothing, I guess. I’m sorry I said anything.”

She stood and dropped her bagel into the bag. She hadn’t touched it. “I’ll see you later,” she said.

Brienne took her coffee and her breakfast and left him there, staring at his half-eaten bagel. She had to get back to work, anyway. 

* * *

Sam and Jon were both in the Westerlands Games suite when she walked in. She felt a perverse sort of satisfaction when she saw them: they looked as pasty and exhausted as she had that morning. At least she wasn’t the only one pulling all-nighters.

“Good morning,” she said, booting up her computer. “How are things going on your end?”

“Terrible,” Jon said. 

“More dead players?” she asked.

“Worse,” Jon replied. “Zombies.”

“Well, not actual zombies,” Sam explained. “It turns out that the hacker, whoever he is, has escalated to taking over dormant characters while players are sleeping and…moving them, once they are disabled.”

Jon turned his computer toward her and pressed play. A video showed the Red River in HeroAge Adventures at nighttime, moonlight shining in the water. The way the game followed real-world time had been one of its most highly-praised features. Then, slowly, something moved in the darkness toward the river. People. The figures moved slowly, feet shuffling in unison. As they approached the banks of the river, they came under the moonlight and into view. They just stared blankly, in single-file rows. At the river’s edge, the people all stopped and looked ahead. The in-game breeze ruffled their hair and the multicolored dresses and tunics with different sigils on the front. Not one expression changed.

“I took this at four this morning,” Jon said. “They’re still there.” Brienne shook her head in disbelief.

“Some of these are active users,” Sam said. “I have sixty-three requests to go in and return the characters to their owners. Do you know how long that will take? I have to log in to each one individually and travel it across the realm back to their village. These are from all over the place!”

“What did Tyrion say?”

“Nothing,” Jon scoffed. “I sent him this video and he said ‘that looks fucked up’ and _then_ said he wouldn’t be in today because he and Addam have to meet with some foundation members who are in town. He’ll probably get pissed off that I’m going to help Sam with these tickets today instead of working on stuff for 2.0. Not to mention trying to figure out who’s doing this.” 

“I could help with the tickets,” Brienne offered. 

“You definitely don’t have the time, if you’re going to be redesigning the whole game,” he said. “Which you should definitely do. Bronn’s designs are hideous.”

“What about Jaime?”

Sam and Jon exchanged a look.

“Does Jaime know anything about the game?” Sam asked. 

“He plays it a lot,” she said. “He runs the Lannister characters when Tyrion isn’t. I’m sure he could handle whatever you wanted if you explained.”

They both looked skeptical.

“Literally anybody answering these complaints would be helpful,” Sam said finally.

“I’ll ask him for you,” she said, already regretting it as she was saying it. After earlier he’d be justified in running the other way if she even approached him. “We both are here after hours a lot.” 

They both nodded, hesitantly, and then they all three turned to their own computers, plenty of other tasks awaiting them.

Brienne got so absorbed in her new smallfolk designs—there needed to be more variation in their faces, she decided, since interactions with the high lords was way less frequent—that she didn’t even notice that the sun had gone down. She barely registered Sam, and then Jon, packing up for the night, until Jon flipped up the light on his way out. He just grunted when she said thanks and waved, but that seemed to be normal for him, so she turned back to her work. 

It wasn’t until about an hour later, when Jaime sauntered in, that she stepped back from her work. It wasn’t intentional. As soon as he even touched the door to the suite, he was making an obscene amount of noise. He banged the door into the wall as he opened it. He set whatever he was carrying down onto the desk with a loud thud. He sighed, heavily, as he rummaged, aggressively, through a duffel bag under the table. When he popped back up, holding a battery pack and charger in his hand, she had turned completely in her seat to face him. 

“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to disturb you.”

She raised an eyebrow. 

His face broke out into a grin. “Okay, I kind of did.” He stood up and took a seat across from her. “Those your new designs?” he asked, gesturing to her screen. 

She turned to zoom out and show him the full product of the blacksmith she was working on, and he wheeled the chair towards her to peer over her shoulder. His chest leaned across her back; he smelled of cinnamon and cedar, drugstore man scents, but on him, individual.

“Very detailed in the chest area,” he commented, and she rushed to actually zoom out and reveal the full figure. He laughed, a low rumble rolling between them.

“He seems like he‘d be a lot of fun,” he said, when the chubby blacksmith finally filled the screen, red in the cheeks and a twinkle in blue eyes.

She smiled. “The players spend the most time with these characters. I want each of them to have distinct personalities.”

“Has my brother seen this? He’ll be sorry he said no to you when he does.” She could feel his voice through her shoulder. Her hand was sweaty on the Bluetooth mouse. She wished he would back away. 

When he finally did, though, she wanted to take it back. He rolled the chair back to the opposite side of the office and she turned to face him. She knew she was probably all red in the face—he had that smirk, _again_ —but it couldn’t be helped.

“Hungry?” he asked, picking a wrapped package off the table to his side and handing it to her. “I ate my half already.”

She took it and unwrapped it in her lap—a roast beef sub, a little mushy, with strips of lettuce hanging out of one end. Probably wouldn’t have been her first pick, but she was thrilled at the prospect of eating something not pizza or bagels. 

“Thank you,” she said, still looking at the sandwich. “And the air mattress—that was nice of you. I forgot, earlier.” She closed her eyes briefly. Good work, bringing up _earlier_. She hoped he would let it go by.

“Well, I knew I’d get my turn in it eventually, when you get out of this funk you’re in. Or during the day, when you’re working.”

“Speaking of,” Brienne interjected, “how would you like to help us out with something? It’s about the hack.”

“That’s still going on?”

“Getting worse,” Brienne said. “Jon showed me this video—the hacker’s hijacked like a hundred players’ characters and has them all lined up at the Red River.”

“Doing what?”

“Nothing!” she said through a mouthful of roast beef and mayo. Really, it was a terrible sub. “Staring.”

“Why would someone do that?” 

Brienne shrugged. 

“It could be practice,” Jaime mused. “Or a scare tactic. Or a way to distract us during the 2.0 launch.”

“Or all three,” Brienne said. “Anyway, Sam needs help restoring the accounts. Apparently the only way to do it is to go in with God Mode and walk them individually back to their home base. We should maybe fix that in 2.0. Would you help him? He’ll give you all the info in the morning.”

Jaime leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head once more. “I’ll do it,” he said, “on one condition: you deal with your roommate situation. Not that I don’t love sharing a closet with you. It’s a major upgrade from my previous roommate. But think of the press. Westerlands Games Designer Drops Dead of Scurvy After Six Months Living in a Closet and Eating Only Bagels and Free Food. 2.0 will only be a footnote with headlines like that.”

“First of all, you should be helping Sam because you work here, and it’s your job. Technically, it’s your company,” she said.

“Don’t say that around my brother,” Jaime said. “Or the headlines will be about your murder instead.”

Brienne pressed on. “Say you’ll do it. And I’ll work on my roommate situation, if you work on yours. Not that it’s my place; I didn’t mean to get so involved, earlier. You can deal with it however you—“

“It’s fine,” Jaime said, raising a hand to stop her. “You made some good points. Really. I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

He put his hand out toward her instead, then, palm open to the side. “So. We have a deal. I’ll work on the hack, and when you sort out your roommate trouble, I’ll sort out mine.”

She slipped her hand into his, and among the murmur of computers and the voices echoing in the hall of the slowly-emptying office, they shook on it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember gyms?


	3. Danger Awaits

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It occurred to her that they would both be here this whole weekend, together, with no one else from Westerlands around.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s the freakin’ weekend; everybody’s about to have them some fun!

As soon as Sam and Jon arrived in the morning, Jaime pulled all three of them together in the corner of the office suite where he’d been sitting, as far as Brienne could tell, since she went to bed the night before. He reached over from behind his laptop to hit play. The monitor’s grey-blue glow didn’t do him any favors; lit from beneath, his face was all sharp angles and faint shadows. He looked like the rest of them now. Bleak. Exhausted. One caffeinated drink away from short-circuiting. 

The video was from the early hours of the morning. In the tanned, lithe body of a young warrior woman, a razor-edged whip in one hand and a dagger in another, Jaime had been traveling a dark forest road to the nearest port town, in the Bay of Sorrows. His plan was a good one: he would pack all the players who lived in the southern islands into a ship overnight, and they would be able to stay on the ship unharmed until their users came online to tell the captain where to let them off.

This woman was the fifth character that Jaime has led down this path. The forest might have been dangerous, in the dead of night, filled with bandits or wild animals, but he’d used a cheat code that Tyrion had embedded—the Gods’ Protection. A character with this enabled was impervious to attack for twenty-four hours. Everything seemed to be going well. But then, in the forest: the rustle of leaves; a keening cry.

Jaime paused the character’s brisk walk to the sea. He turned her toward the sound. And there, in the darkness, was the strange thing, the reason he made this video. Three sets of glowing blue eyes. They were like nothing they’d created for the game—unnatural, unsettling, disembodied.

Jaime hit pause. “The fuck,” Jon said, shaking his head.

“Did you see them again?” Sam asked. 

“I took her on a different route, after that, and the others, too,” Jaime replied. “But they followed me the whole way through the forest. They wanted to know where I was going, but they also wanted me to know that they know.” 

“That has to be the hacker,” Brienne said. It felt like just the right amount of cocky—just the right amount of showing off. “Hackers, I guess. We don’t have designs like that in the game at all. They must have ported in their own.”

“This was at four a.m., right?” Jon asked, rubbing his eyes. “I’ll take one of the security characters in there tonight to see if they are back again.”

“Good idea. I’m going to take a nap. Hard work, saving the day,” Jaime said, clapping Sam on the shoulder and smirking. “I can take the disabled players on the eastern shore to the Sea of Joy port when I wake up.” He shut his laptop and stood, stretching his limbs into a yawn. Brienne sighed. _Almost there,_ she thought. _You were almost there._

Sam nodded and waved Jaime off as he left the suite, a stiff smile on his face. Jon rolled his eyes and re-affixed a set of giant noise-cancelling headphones to his ears.

“Despite, well—you were right,” Sam said as the glass door twanged shut behind Jaime. “He did good work there. The players on the islands tend to be the less active ones; their users just want to splash around in the water, check in to the virtual beach now and then. I was dreading taking them all back. Now I only have a few minor lords and farmers on my hands. And it seems like everyone’s taking it well. Like a new adventure!”

Brienne gave a small smile. “I told you he would be able to handle it,” she said. Now she just had to get him to play nice. She knew he had it in him, but getting it out of him was a feat with mechanisms she still didn’t fully understand. For now, she had to put it out of her mind. She detached the screen of her laptop, lifted her stylus to the tablet’s screen, and turned back to her own work.

* * *

_  
I don’t like the third one._ Brienne stabbed a slice of green pepper in her takeout container with the end of her chopstick. What the hell kind of answer is that? What did you think of the other prototypes, Tyrion? 1, 2, 4, 5, 6? And what didn’t you like about it? She bit off the slice of pepper and speared a chunk of sauce-laden chicken next.

“Good thing that isn’t a real weapon,” Jaime said. She looked up; he was leaning on the long granite bar counter in the kitchenette, nursing a pint of beer and surveying her small round table in the common room with a look of bemusement on his face. “You could do some real damage.”

She pointed the empty chopstick at him. “Be careful, or you’ll be next.”

He wasn’t deterred. Instead he opened a drawer in the kitchenette and came at her holding a fork. She bent over the flat plastic takeout container defensively. “This is mine! I even got vegetables!”

He sat down across from her at her table and waved the fork over her arms, trying to sneak in. “Oh, come on,” he said. “I shared my sub with you yesterday!” 

She sat back, removing her arms reluctantly. She didn’t want to be rude, and his outrage uncomfortably reminded her of her freshman roommate at college, bewildered at Brienne’s annoyance when she used her handheld iron without asking. Sharing had never been her strong suit, her father always said.

“So,” he said, triumphantly raising a piece of chicken to his lips, “what drove you to such violence against your defenseless food?”

“It’s nothing. Just work stuff.” She didn’t wish to see a replay of the staff meeting, Jaime rushing in to fight his brother on her behalf without asking. Even if it did get her what she wanted.

“If only we were coworkers,” he said, eating some of her rice next. She willed herself not to pull the container away again. “I might understand.”

“It’s really not a big deal.”

“Your vegetables might disagree,” he countered.

“Fine,” she sighed. “I sent your brother a set of prototypes last night and all he said back was ‘I don’t like the third one.’”

“What the hell kind of answer is that?” Jaime said. 

“Exactly!” She slammed her palms on the table. “Exactly.”

He pulled out his phone. She grabbed his hand before he could do anything. “Please don’t say anything. I don’t want to cause trouble. I’m just complaining. I’ll ask him for more details and redo the third one.”

He didn’t pull his hand back, but he didn’t make any further moves to text or call his brother, so she released him. He tucked the phone back into his pocket.

“Thank you,” she said.

He shrugged in response. 

“Aren’t you going to drink your beer?” she asked, looking up to the pint glass, lonely and sweating onto the counter. 

“It’s probably warm now,” he replied. 

“Sorry,” she said, though she didn’t quite know what she was apologizing for. She didn’t make him abandon it to come steal her dinner.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It wasn’t that great to begin with. They overdid it with the hops. And I have to stay sharp anyway. Gotta patrol the Valley tonight. I really should be hydrating.”

She scooped a huge chunk of rice over to her side of the container. “A big night of ‘saving the day’ ahead?”

“Oh, don’t say it like _that_ ,” he said. “I was just joking around.”

“Not sure if they know that, Jaime.”

He sighed. “Well, they’ll know it soon enough. Jon and I are going to do shifts tonight and then all weekend. We just want to get a sense of who this is and what they are doing. They don’t have an account, whoever they are. They’ve been accessing it from the back end. Jon put up a patch, but they just breached another way.”

“Sounds more fun than my weekend. I’ve got to hunt down somewhere to do laundry. I haven’t been in a laundromat in ages. My apartment had in-unit.” It occurred to her that they would both be here this whole weekend, together, with no one else from Westerlands around. Even when they worked through the weekends and late into the night, Jon and Tyrion tended to stay at home. “And I’ve got to work, of course,” she added. 

“Sounds like a good excuse to brave the great roommate confrontation,” he pointed out.

She felt her face flush a little bit. Maybe he wasn’t looking forward to the prospect of being alone in the office with her. She should have just shared the food with him. She should have just let his snarky ‘save the day’ comments go. Now it was awkward. 

“It would take way too long to commute there and back,” she said. “But maybe. It certainly would be cheaper.”

He nodded. Was that relief on his face? He reached his fork back into her meal, and this time she let him.

* * *

  
The next morning, iced coffee in hand, Brienne climbed into a cool subway car to Silk Heights and began to rehearse what she’d say to Loras. 

_Hello. I’m sorry about your cat._

The train was on a weekend schedule, stopping what seemed like every two blocks. Passengers jostled in with shopping bags and their own to-go drinks, giggling and chatting.

_I just want you to know I had nothing to do with it. He was a beautiful cat. The world is a worse place without him._

A man with a gangly Great Dane got on the train, both surveying the crowd haughtily. Next to her, a child squealed out in delight, squirming to climb out of his mother’s arms. Oh, to have a carefree Saturday. Brienne envied them.

The Silk Heights stop was only four blocks from her apartment. As she trudged off the train and up the stairs to the surface, it felt like it might as well have been four hundred. 

Eventually, though, she was there: standing in front of the brick three-story building, staring at the green-painted door. She took a deep breath and turned her key in the lock. 

Upstairs, the apartment she shared with Renly and Loras was quiet, mid-morning light filtering through cheerful sheer curtains in the bright kitchen just off the front door. The sink was piled high with dishes, and she couldn’t imagine them leaving it like that to go away for the weekend, but there were no other signs of life—no TV, no radio, no hushed conversation. Maybe they were asleep. Or, even better, out for breakfast.

Brienne gingerly entered her room. The scene of the crime. The bed was unnmade, and her towel was still crumpled on the floor, where she’d left it on Monday. In the window, her plants sprawled limply in their terra-cotta pots, sending her on another guilt trip she hadn’t even remembered to have. It had been a hot week, and no one had been here to water them. 

She pulled her sweaty, wadded-up clothes out of her backpack and tossed them into her hamper. It was already pretty full, but not to the point of overflowing and demanding she drop everything to confront it. She could worry about it later. Or tomorrow. She threw the musty towel from the floor on top.

The bedroom had always felt laughably small, but even more so now that she’d spent the week sleeping in an actual closet that was more spacious. She could lay back on the bed and touch her hands to the wall on each side. It was only a few feet from her own feet to the door, and the closet was more like a small broom cupboard they’d built in later. It hadn’t bothered her, when she signed the lease; it was available, and affordable, and she assumed she’d be spending so much time at work that she’d barely be there. 

Little did she know how literal that would be. Brienne laughed out loud, like a crazy person, covering her face with her hands.

She lay back on the bed, sneakers dangling over the edge of the mattress. It had been a while since she’d last had a moment like this: completely alone. It was nice, she supposed. Peaceful, like the white of the ceiling. Soft, like the actual permanent bedding under her body. Maybe she could nap here, for a while. Think of nothing.

But that wouldn’t do. She couldn’t just lounge around here all day, when there were designs to create and laundry to do. If she came all this way, it had to be for something. 

She pulled herself up to her knees and waddled over to the window at the head of her bed. When she slid it open, a warm breeze whistled through the small space. Instantly, she felt more awake. She looked down, at the sad plants begging for some attention on the windowsill below. _See, Brienne—if you took a nap now, who would care for the ferns and the succulents?_

She tiptoed into the kitchen, still feeling paranoid despite the continued lack of evidence that anyone was around. Renly usually kept a watering can under the sink, but as she rooted around under there, she didn’t see any sign of it. She stood up and pulled one of two remaining clean glasses off the shelf instead. It was just as well, since there was only a few inches of clearance between the faucet and the mountain of dishes in the sink. She had to maneuver the glass at a weird angle to even get any water into it at all.

Brienne had the glass halfway to full when she heard the voice behind her. “You,” Loras spat.

She dropped the glass into the sink with a terrible splash, all her progress pouring out in the terraces of plates and cups below. 

“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” he asked. Brienne turned to face him. Her hands still gripped the wet edge of the sink. She couldn’t say anything. Loras was an attractive man, with high cheekbones and perfectly tousled blonde wavy hair falling over his forehead. But that day, his face was blotchy and his rage turned the defined angles of his face harsh. 

“I’m sorry about your cat,” she stammered. “I just want you to know that I—“

“You’re _sorry_ ,” Loras laughed, mockingly. He stepped forward, pointing a finger at her. “Sorry doesn’t bring back Ser Peaches, does it?” If Brienne hadn’t been almost a foot taller than him, she would have been scared. Instead, though, she stood up tall and tried to look intimidating as she ran around the bend of the hallway back into her bedroom. 

She slammed the door closed behind her and sat heavily at the end of the bed. Out in the kitchen, she heard Loras loudly opening and closing the refrigerator, sitting down grumpily at the kitchen table. She looked back at her plants. _Sorry, guys,_ she thought, as she hurriedly stuffed clothes from her narrow dresser into her backpack. She hoped Loras eventually remembered to turn off the water.

She was outside on the sidewalk and walking briskly away from the building in a matter of minutes. If Jaime was annoyed with her being around all weekend, he would just have to get over it.

* * *

  
Brienne crept back into the office with the same halting nervousness that she’d felt in Loras and Renly’s kitchen. She didn’t fear a confrontation, like she had before—instead, she feared the stares of those who knew she couldn’t handle one. Stare, singular, if she was being honest with herself. 

She let herself into the Westerlands suite. The lights were off, and Jaime’s bag was missing from its usual spot under the long desk along the wall. Maybe he had honored their agreement and decided to tackle his own roommate demons.

She should be happy for him at the thought, but instead she just had a sinking feeling. It really didn’t make any logical sense for her to feel that way. It was insane that he had been living at the WeWork for months. It was insane that they were both sleeping in a windowless storage room. And Brienne didn’t need someone bringing her food, or making her take breaks. She was an adult! Plus, she’d probably get more done without Jaime showing up and distracting her all the time.

Though she’d miss the company, she thought as she put her headphones in, it was probably for the best. She put on her bounciest pop music, fired up her tablet, and lost herself for the rest of the day in fashioning smallfolk character designs. That was what she should be worrying about, not the personal lives of her co-workers.

Brienne wasn’t wrong: she was much more productive without Jaime around. She had bakers, tanners, and a set of barmaids that were much less scantily clad than the ones Bronn had drawn. She even remembered to feed herself— _take that_ , _Jaime_ , she thought smugly—and went down to a deli to get a tossed salad with five different vegetables. She had just cleared away the empty salad container and reopened her drawings when she heard the door open behind her.

“You’re back,” Jaime said with surprise.

“There was work to do,” Brienne replied, without turning away from her tablet, though in truth she was doing nothing. 

She heard Jaime recline a creaky desk chair back. He probably had one leg crossed in a square over the other, his hands behind his head, smirking. 

“You couldn’t do it while taking advantage of your in-unit laundry?”

Brienne closed her barmaid drawing and opened another, a half-finished traveling minstrel, in a mad dash to seem busy. “How do you know that’s where I was?”

“All your stuff was gone?” He wheeled the chair over so his back was on the table next to her, his face in her line of vision. “Chicken out?”

Brienne put down her tablet and spun in her own chair to face him. “No! I just—it wasn’t pleasant.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Accused of cat manslaughter again?”

“Let’s just say that I don’t think you’ll have me out of your hair anytime soon,” Brienne replied.

He touched the bun at the back of his head. “Hm. I don’t think you’re in there.” Brienne rolled her eyes and turned back to her tablet.

“Oh, come on,” he said, leaning closer. “Tell me you’re not going to work all night. You haven’t touched that sketch since I came in.”

“That’s because you’ve been talking to me the whole time.”

He grabbed her by the arm. “I’ve been alone all day. I’m dying for an adventure. You in?”

Jaime really was terrible for her productivity.

* * *

It turned out that Jaime hadn’t been off reconciling with his sister and making plans to move out of the WeWork. He’d need more than one afternoon for all the therapy and combat training that would take, he said, choking on his laughter, when she asked. No, Jaime had spent his afternoon working on the ninth floor, for a change of scenery. And also to scope out what Sunspear Games was up to, she guessed, though it sounded like none of them had been around. 

This sojourn to the great unknown lands of two floors up, though, had awakened in Jaime a great curiosity. The ninth floor had a ski-ball game and two pinball machines. It also had other charms to recommend it, at least to him. “They have _three_ different beers on tap!” he exclaimed, though he frowned comically when Brienne did not show an equal level of excitement at the possibility of other floors having equally decadent offerings.

“Also! Did you know that there is a martial arts studio and a movie theater on the second floor?” He had pulled up the building’s website on his phone to prove it to her.

“Must be a tiny theater,” she remarked, but she was grinning along with him. His enthusiasm was infectious. She was out of her groove of working anyway, with him there; what harm could it do?

They started all the way up on nine. The speakers on that floor played lightly upbeat electronic music, chirping harmoniously at them as they let themselves in with their keycards. Unlike their floor, decorated in honey-toned woods and sleek grays, this one was decorated in electric greens and oranges. It was like a headache in a room. Jaime poured her samples of all the different beers—“you’ll like this one best; it’s brewed with fresh peaches”—and she kicked his ass four times in ski-ball. She hadn’t expected that; she had pegged him as someone with good hand-eye coordination.

On the eighth floor: two beers, both disgustingly hoppy, but a fridge stocked full of little sample-sized gelatos. On the sixth floor, they found an inflatable jumbo-sized chess set and a Hefeweizen that Brienne drank a whole pint glass of without batting an eye. (Neither of them knew anything about chess, so they just swatted at each other with two life-sized knight pieces out on the common room floor.) 

There were people working in the common area on the fifth floor, glaring at them as they chatted over a local lager and that pancake beer from Brienne’s first all-nighter in the couch closet, so they double-fisted their way into the elevator to drink in peace on four. _That_ floor had black-and-white polka dots painted on the walls and a beer with 14% A.B.V. called Barrel Fever. Brienne had to lay down on the couch for a minute there; she almost missed completely when laying back, sending Jaime into a very juvenile fit of giggles. He dragged her down to three still, forcing her to drink a glass of water with cucumbers floating in it while he sampled a dark beer that was supposed to taste like peanut butter. 

“Not close at all.” He swallowed the remains of the glass with a grimace. 

“Sorry to end your night so anticlimactically,” she replied. 

“Tarth, it’s only 9:30,” he laughed. It felt like they’d been drinking for hours longer. “The night is young. And we still haven’t seen that martial arts studio!” 

Their keycards didn’t let them in to the martial arts studio. But they did get them in to the other attraction on the second floor: the tiny movie theater. The lights were on in the grungy faux-punk style lobby, illuminating an empty snack counter, an empty popcorn machine, and two more beers on tap. Just the sound of the liquid pouring into Jaime’s pint glass made Brienne have to pee, so she scampered off under a graffiti-inspired sign for restrooms while Jaime looked for hidden snacks.

When she came back out, Jaime was gone and the theater door was propped open. She hadn’t been wrong: it _was_ tiny. Ten rows of red-upholstered seats rose on a small incline from a screen that took up the whole wall. In the middle of the middle row sat a mound of little vending machine cheddar popcorn bags, so many that they had practically had their own seat. She heard the sound of a fist knocking on glass and looked up. At the top of the sloped of seats was a squat little control room, with a window looking down. 

In that window was Jaime, grinning and waving down at her.

By the time she reached him, he had turned his attention back to the array of equipment inside. He clearly had no idea what he was doing; just in the time it took her to stride up the single aisle and open the door, he’d managed to turn off one segment of the round overhead lights and then turn them all back on at a blindingly bright full intensity. 

“Are you just hitting random buttons?” she asked him.

“No,” he replied, jumping as the speakers crackled to life and then screeched. 

Brienne spotted a DVD player resting on top of the table, next to a switch labeled ‘projector.’ She felt a bit hazy after all that beer, but she was pretty sure that those two things in combination would play a movie on the screen. She reached across him and flipped the switch for the projector and then the screen filled with a flickering blue square.

“Now who’s hitting random buttons?” Jaime said, trying to sound pouty. 

Brienne ignored him and turned on the DVD player and hit play. The title card for the movie flashed on the screen. WHEN FLORIAN MET JONQUIL 2.

“Ugh,” Jaime said. “I hated the first one.”

“Really? I actually liked this one better,” she admitted. 

He raised his eyebrow and grinned over at her. She really had to sit down. She’d had a lot to drink. But she at least had enough sense to bat Jaime’s hand out of the way when he reached for the control board again, and pushed him out the door. She squinted down at the row of dials in front of her. Lights, lights, lights...there! A few slides of some dials and the lights in the theater dimmed down completely. She turned off the projector room light and walked back down the aisle, toward the mound of popcorn.

She’d expected Jaime to take one side of the popcorn chair and her to take the other. He did sit down next to the popcorn, but on the aisle side, blocking her from getting across. He leaned back, feet on the chair in front of him, eating from one of the vending machine popcorn bags. She walked up to his legs, expecting him to move them so she could pass through. When he didn’t, she cleared her throat.

He looked up. “Are you just going to stand there?” 

She felt her face grow hot. “Oh,” she said. “I, uh, just wanted to get some popcorn.”

He plucked a bag from the pile and tossed it up at her. She barely caught it.

“Sit down,” he said. “You’re missing the crucial scene where they both are drinking coffee and walking on the sidewalk alone and not talking.” 

“It’s the set-up,” she explained, taking the seat next to him. “They’re going to run into each other again just...now!”

“No spoilers, Tarth,” he joked. 

Brienne watched Jaime watch the movie out of the corner of her eye. He seemed to laugh at the right parts: he smiled wistfully at the romantic scenes. The reason she liked the sequel better is that their relationship picked right back up where it had been before, even if they both didn’t want it to. She liked the idea of a love so strong that it could survive change and sadness and loss. The idea of a love that was inevitable. 

It wasn’t until the scene when Jonquil opened the door in her revealing nightie for a drunk and roughed-up Florian that Brienne realized that Jaime had his arm stretched across the back of her chair. Her throat went dry as the pair onscreen kissed their way across Jonquil’s dark living room. She stiffened under the light touch of his arm on her shoulders as Florian’s coat hit the floor. Jaime’s just one of those guys who sits like this—spreading out everywhere, she reassured herself. It means nothing.

Florian pulled Jonquil’s nightie over her head. She’d forgotten that this scene involved full-frontal nudity.

“Do you think Ygritte Wilder has breast implants?” Jaime mused.

“Uh,” she stammered, “I hadn’t really thought about it? They fall, um, pretty naturally.”

He hummed in agreement as the bedroom door closed and the screen faded to black. Brienne let out a long breath and shoved a handful of popcorn in her mouth.

She didn’t really pay attention to the rest of the movie. Jaime hadn’t moved his arm at all. Also he kept rustling around in the popcorn and sucking the cheese dust off his fingers loudly. She could even hear him chew. It was all very distracting, even for someone who’d seen this movie before.

“I think,” he said, stretching his arms over his head as the credits rolled, “that this wasn’t so bad after all. They should have given this movie a better title, though. Florian Meets Jonquil Again. Florian Re-Meets Jonquil. The Second Time Florian Met Jonquil.”

“Those titles are full of spoilers,” Brienne pointed out. He laughed at that—a real genuine laugh that wasn’t at her expense. 

As they gathered up the carnage of their vending-machine popcorn bags, though, the conversation turned serious. 

“So, what did happen with your roommates?” Jaime asked. “Did you walk up to the house and see a wanted poster on the door? ‘Cat Murderer: Armed and Dangerous’ underneath a sketch of your face?”

“Just a...confrontation. Loras—the one who found the dead cat—wanted me to admit I killed him, and...beg for forgiveness? He got pretty shouty.” It could have escalated beyond that, she knew. If he had been more physically intimidating, or armed—she didn’t want to think about it. And over a cat! They have a short lifespan as it is.

She must have been making a serious face, lost in these thoughts, because Jaime was looking concerned. 

“Sounds like you need to get a new apartment,” he said.

“I’m way too busy with 2.0 right now to deal with it.” And he should talk, she thought as she walked up to the control room to turn off the projector and lights. 

The elevator took longer than expected to arrive, for late on a Saturday night when no one was around. Jaime leaned on the wall by the call buttons, hands in his pockets, smirking at her. She wished he’d stop.

“Next time you go to that apartment, you should bring reinforcements,” he said.

“Like who? I just moved here. I know six people.” And have zero friends. Well, maybe one, if she could count a guy who hung out with her because they were literally trapped in the same room half of the time.

“Like me!” He looked affronted that she’d even had to ask. “I can intimidate the shit out of people. I learned from the master: my father.” She couldn’t picture his quirky graphic tees and thirty-something manbun look intimidating anyone. But maybe she was underestimating him.

“Well, thank you for the offer. After the launch, maybe.” 

The elevator arrived at last, empty. They rode up to the seventh floor in silence. She looked at the watch on Jaime’s wrist. 12:35. Not too bad. Maybe she could get some good sleep in and wake up feeling rested, for once. Jaime probably would be busy patrolling the game on the night shift with Jon.

She didn’t expect the doors to open to the thudding sound of rap music on their floor. The lights in the common room were dimmed, and plastic cups and half-empty plates of cake littered the kitchen. A handful of people danced and laughed under inflatable balloons that spelled out AURORA 5! 

“Looks like our invitation got lost in the mail,” Jaime said, surveying the party.

“Maybe they threw this party in celebration of us actually leaving the floor for more than five minutes,” she replied, sending Jaime into another satisfying fit of laughter.

Brienne wound around the revelers over to the path that would lead back to the storage room and her bed. Couch. Air mattress. Whatever. She spotted Jaime pausing to swipe a mini cupcake off a table as he followed. 

A moaning sound from the direction of the office suites made her stop in her tracks. Jaime bumped into her back. 

“Uh, I think there are some people...having fun,” Brienne said. “Over there.”

Jaime walked forward a few steps, peering around a glass corner. He came running back, stifling a laugh with a hand over his mouth.

“Just follow my lead,” he said, grabbing her forearm. “On three—one, two—“ He started running and pulling her behind him. “—three!” 

They charged around the corner and down the row. Jaime started cheering at the top of his lungs as they passed the block of suites belonging to Aurora. Up against the glass, under the soft script spelling out the bedding start-up’s name, was a woman’s naked ass. A man, presumably also naked, looked over her shoulder at them in shock. Brienne turned her face away and pushed Jaime forward to run away faster.

They kept running, through the rest of the empty rows of offices, until they reached their storage room. Brienne had started laughing somewhere along the way, and she was out of breath and practically wheezing as Jaime opened the door.

She pushed through behind him, the room still dark. She made to push the switch to turn on the lights, but instead she missed, tripping over her own feet and Jaime’s too.

They both fell to the floor. Jaime landed on his back, partway on the air mattress, with a plasticky _thwack_. Brienne threw out her arms to brace herself against her own fall, but mostly she just slammed the bony part of her hip into his knee.

She waited for him to laugh. She tried to think of a clever joke. But there was nothing from either of them—just the sounds of them breathing in the tiny room, the walls growing tighter and tighter around them in the darkness.

Jaime was the first to move. His hand came up to her waist, just resting there. Not moving her off him. Brienne felt herself sink a bit lower on her forearm, her stomach pressing against his. Her eyes were used to the darkness, and she could see him watching her, his face just inches from her own. 

She could kiss him right now. It would be so easy. She could imagine the lines of his jaw in her hand and the buzz of his stubble under her palms. But what then? she thought. Was it worth it to go kissing your one sort-of friend in the city? Who you worked with? Who you saw every day?

“Sorry,” she said, ducking her head to rest on his chest. “I was trying to turn off the lights.”

She felt his chuckle rumble through his chest. Before she could do any more damage, she pushed herself up to sitting, pulling her legs away from his. 

She grabbed her bag and stood up. “I’m going to get ready for bed,” she said, trying to sound lighthearted. “You can have the air mattress tonight.” 

Though Jaime still lay on his back, face angled up to look at her, she could see him nod. She backed out of the door and headed toward the bathroom, taking the longest route she could find around the floor. To avoid the Aurora suites, of course, she told herself.

Jaime was asleep, facing the wall, on the air mattress, when she got back. 

* * *

  
Although Brienne’s head throbbed the next morning, she still made herself get up when her alarm chirped the next morning at 8. On the air mattress, Jaime grunted and pulled the pillow over his head, but he didn’t make a move to leave the bed.

 _Thank the gods_ , Brienne thought. She didn’t know what she’d say to him. 

With her face washed and her clothes changed, she made her way downstairs and out of the building in search of breakfast. Should she pick up something for Jaime, too, to show him there were no hard feelings? Or would that make him think she thought there was something more going on here? 

There was no line at Alys’s, so she had to decide fast. “One plain bagel with strawberry cream cheese, and one chocolate chip bagel with chocolate cream cheese,” she blurted to the cashier. “And two iced coffees.” It was weird already. She couldn’t make it any weirder. And she’d do this if last night had been total normal, wouldn’t she?

The two coffees in a tray in one hand and the bagel bag in the other, Brienne made her way back up to the Westerlands Games office. The party from the night before was mostly cleaned up, though the garbage can overflowed with dirty paper plates and a tray of leftover cupcakes sat on the counter for the taking. Brienne thought it was a little gross, but a man with dark hair stood over the counter, piling a few onto a plate, so she might have been in the minority on that one.

It took some maneuvering to open up the Westerlands suite with all the food, but she eventually managed it. She put Jaime’s food down on the table and settled down with her designs from the other day. Even with a hangover, it was comforting to be sitting down to work. She could worry about color schemes and fabric textures, and not other things. 

Someone knocked on the glass and she turned from the window, her stomach dropping.

But it wasn’t Jaime. It was the man from the kitchen, the leftover cupcake eater. Now that he no longer had his back to her, she realized that she knew his face. She had scrolled through his LinkedIn and his social countless times in the lead-up to her interview for Westerlands. The man was Bronn Blackwater, the designer who held her job before her.

She opened the door for him. He peered around her into the suite, nodding as he looked around. “Just as I remembered it,” he said. “You must be the new Design Warrior. I had the honor of that post not too long ago.”

“Yes,” she said, sticking out her hand, “that’s me. Brienne. You must be Bronn.”

He grinned. “Reputation precedes me, does it? I heard you guys have been having some issues lately. Hope it doesn’t get worse. That would be tough for your 2.0.”

“Oh, that. We’re handling it.” Brienne didn’t like the slimy look on his face.

“Good. Good. Wouldn’t want to see you guys become old news, after all we’ve been through together.”

“So touching how much you care.” Jaime. He stood just behind Bronn, having walked through the kitchenette carrying a tray of iced coffees. 

Bronn turned and clapped him companionably on the shoulder. “Jaime! I can’t believe my fuckin’ eyes. You, in the office. On a Sunday!”

Jaime did not return Bronn’s cheer. “Yes, well, we have a launch to work on. All hands on deck.”

“Ha! More like it took getting some estrogen in here for you to come sniffing around.” He turned the creepy smile over to Brienne, as though she’d be pleased to hear the comment.

“You know, I haven’t missed you at all,” Jaime said. “Move. We have things to do.” He pushed his way inside the suite, and slammed the glass door shut in Bronn’s face.

“I already got us breakfast from Alys’s,” she said, staring at the coffees and paper bag in his arms. 

He shrugged. “Guess we’ll be very caffeinated.” He looked over his shoulder; Bronn was nowhere to be seen.

“It’s totally fucking Bronn,” Jaime said. She’d wondered; who else would have that kind of access. 

“Why would he come down to gloat about it, though?” she asked. If she was involved in corporate espionage, she’d make herself scarce.

Jaime pulled out his computer from his messenger bag. “Because he’s a fucking dumbass,” he said. He grinned over at her. “We’re going to crush him.”

She smiled back. Whatever happened between them, they could at least do this, together. Brienne turned back to her work, trying not to think about later that night, when she and Jaime would try to fall asleep alongside each other in that tiny room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> True story: there really is a movie theater in one of the Manhattan WeWorks.


	4. The Siege

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team lifted their energy shots in a toast. 
> 
> “We got this,” Tyrion said. 
> 
> “We got this,” they all intoned. 
> 
> They drank.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh hi!

Tyrion burst through the door of their suite, his face red with terror and rage. The programming staff, silently huddled over their laptops in a tight circle, looked up in alarm.

“We have a big problem,” Tyrion proclaimed.

Brienne looked over at Jon, who was looking over at Sam, who was looking over at Jaime.

“We’re aware,” Jon said.

Tyrion thrust his phone at him. “Look at this! Look at it!” Brienne peeked over Jon’s shoulder. Tyrion had pulled up the same screen caps they’d all seen. The pictures had been circling social media and all the boards for the last twelve hours: users’ characters bleeding out all over the HeroAge Realm, their throats cut and heads hacked off in inventive and gruesome ways. 

Tyrion threw himself into a beanbag chair that was stuffed into a corner. “This is supposed to be a family friendly game!”

Brienne and Jaime exchanged a look. Had he seen the other photos? The ones where all the headless corpses had somehow taken up arms and wandered in packs menacingly around the countryside? Those were even less family friendly. 

“We’re working on it,” Sam said, trying and failing to smile. 

Adam poked his head in around the glass door, giant smoothie in hand. “Working on what?” He took a long, casual, slurping sip.

“Saving us from destruction,” Tyrion moaned, tipping his head back melodramatically. “If there is anything left to save.”

Brienne had admired Tyrion for his leadership so far. Mostly because he trusted his employees to do their work well on their own. But, it occurred to her, as she sat there, staring at his meltdown, that there were a few drawbacks to a hands-off approach. 

“There is plenty left to save,” Jaime said. “Grab your laptops, fellas, and join us.”

Jon turned to him. “What are you thinking? Should we have them lead the Lannister characters to drive back the zombie army?”

Tyrion’s hands stilled on his laptop cover. “The _what_?”

Sam smiled apologetically as he and Addam settled in.

Jaime leaned forward. “Ok, team,” he said, “we got this.”

* * *

  
They did not have it.

The game-wide carnage was immense. Brienne has taken on the role of helping Sam with the individual users. The ones who hadn’t been beheaded and sent to join the axe-wielding hoard creeping through the fields were easy enough to deal with. Their bleeding bodies just lay in their smallholds; all Brienne had to do is activate God Mode and reset them, one by one. There was often blood staining everything in their homes; in those cases, Brienne walked her lady knight character over to their front door with a bag of gold for each of them to use in repairing their house. “A gift from the King himself,” she said each time.

Some of them were grateful. Some of them looked murderous and Brienne would have to skeedaddle out of there, cowed despite the sword she carried. (Not that she would have used it. That would have been a whole other PR nightmare.)

Jaime, Jon, Addam, and Tyrion had a different challenge. They were chasing the other users, the ones who had left their heads behind in their keeps. It was immediately clear that no one was going to get in there to walk the characters back to their homes or reset them. The users didn’t have control of their bodies, and without the heads, it was hard to tell who was who. 

Plus, they all had weapons. Mostly axes, though a few had swords and one a mace. And when Jaime approached one, just as an experiment, he found out that they were very capable of using them.

“Who is controlling these characters?” He groaned as he moved in his character for a sword-duel. Brienne peeped over his shoulder. _He was doing a pretty good job_ , she noticed.

“Who the fuck knows?” Jon was locked in his own battle with a headless zombie a few in-game paces away. “I’d like to stab _him_ instead.” He knocked the zombie to the ground with a deep slash to the chest, but the damned thing just stood back up. 

“Retreat!” Jaime yelled. “Retreat!”

The four of them pulled their characters back, mounting their horses and riding up onto the nearest hill. Spread below was the army of the undead: a still, menacing blanket of gloom and gore. As one, they all lifted their weapons into the air and shook them in their general direction.

“Holy fuck,” Tyrion said.

Holy fuck was right. They were going to be here for a long time.   
  


* * *

As the sun started to set—both in the Realm and King’s Landing—the team could only agree on one thing: they needed a strategy. The hackers clearly had one. They seized control of the characters at night in Westeros, when the bulk of the game’s users were less likely to be online to notice what was happening. They exploited the fact that Support had to work in real time in the game to distract and overwhelm the staff. And then there was the imagery: shocking and horrifying, drawing maximum attention and upsetting users who largely came to them for a soothing, relaxing experience.

Jaime argued for surveillance—spreading their characters throughout the Realm overnight and watching for unusual activity. The hackers had their mysterious blue-eyed spies lurking around; he’d seen them plenty of times since he first caught them on video. If they could catch for Admin Takeover one of those, or any other suspicious character lurking about, they’d get all kinds of information.

“But you haven’t,” Tyrion pointed out. “Caught any.”

“They move fast! And they’re really good at hiding!” Jaime sighed. “I’m starting to figure them out. I’m close. I can feel it.”

Sam and Jon wanted to put out a call for help on the boards. There were only six of them. If they got some of the most dedicated users to help with nighttime surveillance and corralling the zombie army, they could work faster.

Brienne didn’t think that was a bad idea. “It would free you up to work on patching whatever exploits the hacker’s using,” she pointed out.

“It would also alert all of our users to the fact that we can’t handle this on our own,” Addam said. “Not great for brand loyalty right before we launch 2.0.”

“It’s clear that we can’t handle this on our own! We wouldn’t be in this position if we could handle it!” Brienne had never seen Jon get so animated. His face was a blotchy shade of red and he looked about ready to leap up on the desk and give them an impassioned speech. 

There was one thing no one had suggested. In the lull after Jon’s outburst, Jaime looked over to her, one eyebrow raised. She knew it wasn’t just a reaction to what Jon was saying. The night before, he had flopped down on the couch in the storage room with a dramatic sigh loud enough to wake her up. 

He hadn’t even apologized when she’d looked up at him blearily. “Sometimes I think it’d be easier to just delete the whole game and start over again.”

“Deleting is a bit extreme.” She’d pulled herself up to sitting, trying not to lean too close to the couch, where he was sprawled out on his back. “Suspending gameplay, though…”

“A rest and reset.” She’d nodded, even though Jaime would have barely been able to see her in the dark. “Tyrion won’t like that idea.” 

“Can you convince him?” 

He’d just laughed and reached out to pat her head softly. “He won’t listen to me.”

In the office suite, in the aftermath of Jon’s fury ringing in the air, the glance he gave her was goading her on. _Give it a shot_ , he was saying. _He won’t listen to me._

“What if we shut down the game for a bit while we worked?” she suggested. “We could develop the patch and then reset to a point from before this all started.”

No one said a word. Brienne felt her face flush. She was going to stab Jaime when she next got him alone. 

“It probably wouldn’t be a big issue for users,” Jaime ventured. Okay—maybe she wouldn’t _stab_ him. Maybe just scold him strongly. “They would only lose a week or two of data and it’s not like it’s fun to play now when you could literally get your head chopped off.” _A week or two?_ Brienne thought. With everything that had happened since then, she truly couldn’t believe that was all the time that had passed.

“Absolutely not,” Tyrion said. “That’s what they want! They want to take us down. We will not let them win.”

“It would make our jobs easier,” Sam said, smiling in terror.

Tyrion stood. “Your jobs aren’t meant to be _easy,_ ” he spat. He glared at Jaime. “I said no. I’m the CEO. Find another way.” He stride out of the room, the glass door swinging furiously behind him.

Finally, Addam broke the silence. “Anyone else up for Pentoshi food? On the house.”

The break was more than welcome. Jon gave Addam his order and then laid back on the floor with his eyes closed. Sam happily opened a game on his phone, no doubt thrilled to be thinking of something other than cleaning up zombie murder carnage.

Jaime just stared into space. He jumped when Addam tapped him on the arm to see if he wanted anything. 

“Maybe you should check on Tyrion,” Brienne suggested softly when Addam left to call the Pentoshi place. 

“He’s an adult. He’s fine.”

“Yes, storming out after yelling at your staff is usually an indicator of being fine.” 

Jaime sighed. “I don’t know why he gets so mad when I try to be involved. He knows that I would never try to take this away from him, no matter what the paperwork says.”

“Does he?” Brienne couldn’t imagine ever getting over her father—her one surviving parent—blatantly showing her disfavor enough that she has to lie to get him to help her. If what Jaime said was true, and their father blamed him for their mother’s death, he probably had a lifetime’s worth of self-loathing and insecurity.

Jaime just shrugged and fiddled with his phone.

“Go find him,” Brienne urged. “Remind him you’re on the same team. We’re all on the same team.”

“Promise you won’t eat my dumplings?” He held out his pinky. She linked it with hers, feeling a little giddy and also a little stupid for feeling giddy. Who gets flustered over a pinky touch?

When Jaime came back to their suite about an hour later, he had a case of DragonFire energy shots in his arms, and a much calmer Tyrion at his heels. 

“Let’s try spreading out for surveillance tonight,” Tyrion announced. “If that doesn’t get us anywhere, then we’ll move on to other ideas.”

Jaime set down the energy drinks, and Brienne handed him his unopened carton of Pentoshi dumplings.

“You’ll find they’re all there,” she said. “I take my vows very seriously.”

He peered inside the carton and frowned. “I think they’ve gotten cold.”

Brienne rolled her eyes. “I never swore to keep them warm, too.” 

* * *

  
Brienne had never liked DragonFire energy shots. She could pull all-nighters, if she really had to; sometimes she would even drink coffee far later than she should to make it happen. But all-nighters on DragonFire were a class apart, and not in a good way: she felt both foggy and jittery, both hyper-present and on another planet. After a few out-of-body study sessions in college, she swore the stuff off for good.

Until now. Jon cracked his first shot open solemnly. Jaime did the same, and then passed her one of her own. _If_ _ever there was a time, it was now._

The team lifted their energy shots in a toast. 

“We got this,” Tyrion said. 

“We got this,” they all intoned. 

They drank. 

The strategy was simple: for the next eight hours, until sunrise, they would all take their characters to separate quadrants of the Realm and look for any abnormalities in the villages. Jon hadn’t installed the patch yet that would allow them to quickly ‘teleport’ around, but he did engineer it that they all got horses, so it took far less time for them to spread out. 

The goal was to observe the hackers in play, or, even better, get close enough to take over their characters. God Mode usually worked from the user end, with someone on staff accessing the player by logging in as the user with full access, but someone on staff could also activate God Mode by scanning the face of an unknown player—a feature Tyrion designed for users who damaged their characters or locked themselves out. Not only could this allow them to stop the hacker from doing any damage, they could look at their activity history and get more clues on how to stop them from coming back.

Addam kept watch on the hill overlooking the zombie army. Sam ranged north, into The Land of Winter. Jaime took the forest road, where they had spotted the blue-eyed creatures the week before. Brienne took the river villages, with its cute cottages and simple castles clustered around farmland and marsh. Tyrion wandered the twisting streets of Old Coast City, their usually bustling capital, and Jon took to the misty dunes along the Bay of Sorrows. All of them activated the God’s Protection to keep them safe from injury; it definitely wouldn’t be great PR for the hackers to add any of them to the zombie army.

At first, their users merrily went about their evenings, most seemingly ignorant of the headless horde on the realm’s Western coast. They caught fish; cavorted in taverns; prepared meals for family and friends. They bought rooms in inns and got ready to turn in; they hobbled their horses and brought their sheep back to their farms. Soon, though, the moon hung high in the sky, and a hush slowly settled on the realm. The taverns and brothels still bustled, and a light shone out here and there from within individual dwellings, but the hills and the meadows and the roads stilled. 

Addam, out in the middle of nowhere by the zombies, shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “It’s so dark,” he complained. “I can’t see anything. How am I supposed to fight the zombies when I can’t see?”

Sam, at one point, shrieked and pushed his computer away from himself, across the floor. Everyone turned to him in alarm. 

“Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “False alarm. Just a polar bear. Didn’t know we had those in here.”

Riding slowly from village to village, Brienne saw neither polar bears nor overpowering darkness. Sometimes she caught sight of two users kissing in an alley—she didn’t want to imagine them doing more than that—or a man playing a flute or whittling out in front of his home. But aside from that, she encountered nothing strange in the towns along the river. The castles slept. The wildlife tiptoed softly in the grass. The stars twinkled peacefully in the sky. It was almost dreamlike, to wander the realm like this.

A ping from her computer snapped Brienne to attention. Their company instant messenger filled her screen. In the window, a single photograph: Brienne, in profile, head drooping low, eyes closed. The sender was, of course, Jaime.

 _sleeping beauty_ , he wrote.

She cast a glance over toward him, at her side. His brow was furrowed, his gaze intent on his computer screen, but she could see him biting back a grin.

 _I hate you_ , she replied. Jaime sent her a series of frowning emojis.

Brienne rubbed her eyes, drank some water, and tried to keep her focus. It didn’t really work; just an hour later, Jaime was elbowing her in the ribs.

“Ok, this is getting sad,” he whispered. “Just go take a nap.”

“No one else is taking a nap,” Brienne protested.

“They will be soon, trust me,” he said. “You’re just the first. I’ll patrol the villages for you. I’m all out of forest anyway.”

Brienne opened her mouth to disagree, again, but instead she yawned. Jaime shut her computer and pointed at the door. She looked to the others, all hunched over their own game, headphones in ears. She expected glares as she stood, but all she got was a thumbs-up from Sam.

A few minutes later, locked safely in the storage closet, Brienne plugged in her phone and flopped back onto the air mattress. The complete darkness settled over her like a warm blanket.

She was out in a matter of moments: blissfully, blankly asleep.

* * *

  
A bright light on her face pulled her back to consciousness. Brienne sat up, her arm over her eyes.

“Sorry,” said Jaime, shuttling the door. “I had to get back here before I pulled a Brienne and passed out on my keyboard.”

Brienne looked at her phone. 4:30. “I should get up,” she said. “Do you think anyone wants to sleep in here in my place?” 

Jaime sunk on to the air mattress behind her. “If you tell anyone about our secret crash pad, I’m posting that photo to Ravenbook.”

“No one uses Ravenbook anymore, anyway,” she replied. 

Jaime laughed and patted her on the back. “Go get ‘em, Warrior,” he said. 

She stood and opened the door to leave. Brienne couldn’t resist looking back at Jaime in the sliver of light from the hallway, stretched out belly-down on the mattress, his arms pillowed under his head and his longish hair falling loose over his eyes. Even exhausted, he had the nerve to look confident and put together.

The Westerlands suite shone like a beacon in the quiet, dimmed hallways. Even having every lamp in the office turned all the way to their brightest settings, though, did not do much to keep the staff awake. On the stiff red loveseat along the shortest wall, Sam was curled into a ball, snoring softly. Tyrion remained in the beanbag chair, head tipped onto his own shoulder and his computer in sleep mode on his lap.

On the floor, staring wide-eyed at their laptops, were the only two staff members who were still awake: Addam and Jon. They sported bloodshot eyes and disheveled hair, and one look at the floor around them told how they got that way. Empty DragonFire Energy containers littered the ground.

“So, how’s it going?” Brienne asked, pulling her computer from the desk.

Jon looked up from the two laptops he was running. “Well, I had to turn off all the NPCs,” he said. “I saw one wander out and behead a user coming out of a tavern. I think the hackers are possessing them somehow.”

“But,” Addam chimed in, “he didn’t notice that until after there were a bunch of new zombies, so he had to fight some off and then set them on fire.”

“Sam said we can give the users new characters and six months’ free gameplay,” Jon said with a grimace. It was the right thing to do, though. Replacing a dead character cost a user a hefty start-up fee to get a new body; Tyrion said it discouraged people from enacting creative deaths in their otherwise very pleasant game.

“What did Tyrion say about all this?” Brienne asked.

Addam shrugged. “He’s mostly been asleep. But he wants to fix it. He might be pissy about it, but he’ll get on board if it fixes things faster without shutting down the game.”

Brienne looked over at their CEO, still out cold in the beanbag chair. “We should start laying the groundwork for your plan, Jon. Send out a call for volunteers to monitor the zombies so we can work on repairs on the back end. I think our users are pretty dedicated. They’ll probably be thrilled to help.”

“Maybe they’ll even find the hacker,” Addam suggested. “Do you think he beheaded himself?”

 _Kind of rich to assume it was a singular_ he _,_ Brienne thought, but she let it go. 

The three of them set to signing up for all the boards and WeirChat servers dedicated to the game. Their user base was mostly in Westeros, but Jon suggested requesting recruits from all over the world. “We can have 24-hour coverage that way,” he explained.

Brienne was scrolling through the WeirChat channels, getting the lay of the land, when Addam slammed his hand suddenly on the hardwood floor. “Holy fuck,” he yelled. “Fucking fuck!” 

Tyrion sat up. “Whatsamatter?”

Addam turned his laptop around so the rest of them could see. In the dark night of the game, soaring over the motionless undead army, a flash of light cracked across the sky. Once, twice: quick. Then, a long burst of light revealed the thing that had jolted Addam. 

A dragon. A hulking, scaly, fire-breathing dragon, with a blue-eyed man in a dark cape on its back.

The ground below the dragon rumbled. It breathed out another peal of bright light. In the trail it illuminated on the ground, figures began to move into view. There were hundreds of them, all marching in unison—knights in electric blue armor, helms closed over their faces, swords at the ready.

“How did they get a dragon?” Jon asked. “This version doesn’t even _have_ dragons.”

“Fuck it.” Tyrion had two energy drinks in each hand. “Let’s get as many recruits as we can get.”

* * *

  
“Where does the dragon go during the day?” Jaime asked. He casually against the long row of desk spaces under the window of their suite, slurping at the dregs of an iced coffee and looking infuriatingly freshly rested. Not a bag under his eye or a furrow on his brow.

The staff, in various states of all-nighter dishevel, was all crammed into the suite in a tight circle for a morning debrief. Tyrion had run out to get them all donuts and coffee before Jon explained the dire state of affairs. None of it tasted as good as her usual order at Alys’s, but the donuts did have wacky flavors like french toast and maple bacon. 

The story of all the excitement from just before sunrise had brought their sugar high to a shuddering halt. Dragons. Body-snatching. Characters burning alive. A giant knight army. It was a lot to take in. Thankfully, things had calmed down since then. With all the non-playing characters shut off, there hadn’t been any new zombies made. The eastern and western headless hordes, in addition to not getting any bigger, stood mostly still with their weapons not moving. The knight army just marched in place, their feet lifting and falling in a super creepy unison. And the dragon was nowhere in sight.

“Maybe it’s flying above the clouds,” Sam suggested.

“Or napping in a cave somewhere,” Brienne offered.

“Wherever it is, I’m glad to have a break from it.” Jon was miraculously still conscious despite being the only one of them not to sleep at all. Even Addam had curled up on the office floor for a quick nap before they started the work day over again. “The hackers using NPCs to attack means that they have a way into our back end programming. I need to check all the logs for breaches,” he said. 

Brienne had her own tasks for the lull in fighting. While Addam monitored the zombies in the game and Sam answered a thankfully reduced number of user queries, she and Jaime were tasked with reaching out to users online. As she’d predicted, their calls to arms were met with a ton of enthusiasm. Within a couple of hours, they were rallying under the hashtag #SaveHeroAge. Fans were calling them Ser Brienne and JamLam. They were made into memes. “I don’t really get it, but whatever,” Jaime said, chuckling. 

“Maybe because it rhymes?” Brienne guessed. “And there’s that meme with the man chasing after sheep?” But she didn’t really get it either.

The HeroAge players were remarkably good at organizing. One made a sign up sheet for different time slots in all the Realm’s regions. Another shared a database of all the attacks on users since the hack started a few weeks ago—you could sort by day, time, region, and injury.

 _I do get feral for a good spreadsheet_ , one user commented.

“Pretty soon they’ll be running the place,” Jaime laughed when Brienne showed it to him. 

“Honestly, we could use them,” she said, looking longingly at the spreadsheet. 

Jaime grinned. “So that’s the key to your heart. Spreadsheets.” 

Brienne, whose face was definitely growing warmer, was saved from having to respond to that by a knock on their door.

It wasn’t anyone from Westerlands Games. A short girl she didn’t recognize stood there instead, with a crop of blonde hair down to her waist and a rosy fresh-scrubbed face.

“Oh,” she said, holding out a plastic-wrapped tray, “I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Gilly. I work next door and—“

“Oh, hello again,” Sam said, poking around from behind Brienne to take the tray. “The last batch you made was amazing.” 

“I work next door,” Gilly explained. “Sam has been so helpful. We got boxes in of our new snackbox samples and they were so heavy! It’s just me and my friend Val here. We couldn’t have gotten them up here without him.”

“Their work is really outstanding,” Sam said to Brienne. “The flavor profile on the new cranberry energy bars—there’s cardamom and a hint of earl gray—it’s one of the most interesting things I’ve ever put in my mouth.”

“Is that so,” Jaime mused mildly. Brienne stepped on his toe with her heel.

“Are these them?” Brienne asked, taking a bar off the tray and taking a bite. Sam was right: they were good. _Probably the most interesting thing I’ve put in my mouth as well,_ Brienne thought darkly. She gave Gilly a thumbs-up.

The girl blushed a little. “I thought you could use a pick-me-up, what with all the hard work you are doing. Sam told me about the hack. It sounds terribly stressful.”

Brienne looked over at Sam, who was also blushing a bit himself. He cleared his throat. “That was very thoughtful, Gilly.”

“Yes, very,” Brienne echoed. 

The girl grinned. “Anytime! Well. Ok then. Bye!” She skittered off to the neighboring office.

“They are really good,” Brienne said, to a very red-faced Sam. He awkwardly put the tray down and turned intently back to his computer.

Brienne’s instant messenger window popped up on her screen, again. She knew who it would be. 

_THE MOST_ _INTERESTING_ _THING_ _HE’S_ _PUT_ _IN_ _HIS_ _MOUTH_

 _don’t be mean,_ Brienne typed back.

 _i’m not being mean  
_ _i wish a nice blonde would give me something that exciting to put in my mouth_

It was really unfair how he could keep anything from showing on his face. If you looked at him, you wouldn’t know he was typing out ridiculous things to her on the damn company chat. _Do they keep logs of these things?_ Her face grew redder at the thought.

 _She’d probably think the effort was pointless,_ Brienne wrote, _since your mouth is usually occupied prattling nonsense…_

Jaime snorted back a laugh, and Brienne felt vindicated.

“Ok, that’s enough,” Addam said loudly. 

Brienne hurriedly shut her instant message window and turned to face him. “What’s enough?”

“This room,” Addam said. “I am going to lose it if I spend any more time here. I’m going home to sleep somewhere not the floor and change into clothes that haven’t been worn for over twenty-four hours. The rest of you should, too.”

Brienne and Jaime shared a glance. Technically, they already had.

“I popped out last night for a rest and fresh clothes, actually,” Jaime said. “I can handle watching over the recruits for tonight.”

“Me too,” Brienne added. “I’ve got a second wind coming on.” 

Addam gave them a thumbs up and hoisted his backpack onto his back. “I mean it. Get some rest. Everyone has to sleep and take a shower by this time tomorrow.”

Brienne discreetly sniffed her shirt. Not bad, not great—mostly deodorant. 

“It’s not you,” Jaime said under his breath. He gestured toward Jon and Tyrion with a raised eyebrow. “Trust me.”

As much as she did, as soon as the others had turned off their laptops and had trudged wearily out the door, she ran up to the WeGym to hop in to a quick shower. Just in case.

* * *

  
Wednesday morning dawned with the first real success of the week: no new user casualties.

“Oh, the dragon’s still ravaging the realm,” Jaime explained to his brother, as they all dug into the bagels and cream cheese that Brienne had brought up from Alys’s for the morning debrief. “It’s just burned down a large chunk of the forest and an empty village.” They had been lucky; the village belonged to a group of friends who were all volunteering as scouts along the river a bit of a ways away.

“The recruits have had some interesting reports,” Brienne added. “The dragon only comes out for about two hours, 4am to 6am. And the knight army seems to move in unison.”

“Like a lot in unison,” said Jaime. “Arms, legs, heads--it’s like they’re all one person, a hundred times.”

“That’s an interesting thought, actually,” Tyrion said. “Maybe they are one person.”

“One person playing one hundred players at once,” Jon mused. “Or hundreds of characters following the motions of a single player.”

From there, the team devolved into two chattering camps. Addam, Tyrion, and Jon, theorized in fevered tones about the possible ways that the knight army worked. Was the knight among them? If he was, what position would he choose? Left flank? Right flank? Vanguard? How would they get to him? 

Meanwhile, Brienne, Jaime, and Sam talked over the user recruit effort. It had gone better than any of them had anticipated yesterday--over 200 users had pledged to help, and at least three-quarters of them actually had signed up and worked patrols. Still, after a long night circling zombie armies, roving the streets of Old Coast City, and fleeing the dragon across the meadows, Brienne and Jaime could see the enthusiasm waning. #SaveHeroAge wasn’t trending like it was the day before. Only one meme--this one of two dogs working together to steal a pizza from a kitchen counter--was circulating about the effort.

“Maybe we should do something to say thank you,” Sam suggested. “Show our appreciation. I’m sure if we got their addresses, we could get Gilly’s company to send them thank-you packages!”

Brienne and Jaime--well, mostly Brienne--thanked Sam profusely for his idea, which they both silently agreed was terrible. Instead, they settled on digital tactics that were, as Brienne explained to Sam, "easier to get into their hands right away.” 

Brienne set to work on an in-game reward. With all the character replacements and dwelling makeovers Westerlands already had to comp in response to all the zombie-related damage, there wasn’t much room in the budget for more gifts of vouchers for in-app purchases. That didn’t mean that they couldn’t give the recruits anything, though. Brienne designed a version of the basic arms set anyone could purchase--shield, sword, solid-color standard--to carry the likeness of a cartoon maned lion. It was an outtake from her designs for the staff sigil in 2.0., which was supposed to be a lion like the old Lannister family crest; she was pleased to get some use out of it. Hopefully, the recruits would like it. It was unique and would mark them all as being in a sort of exclusive club.

Jaime decided he would make a gift, too. “What if I record a video message for our recruits? A little pep talk?”

As much as she appreciated his pep talks, personally, his usual ‘go get yourself a coffee and some food so you don’t die’ didn’t have the level of gratitude that they needed to convey. “I’d be happy to look at it before you post it,” she offered.

Jaime grinned at her. “Nah. You’ve got a lot on your plate. I got it.” 

Thirty minutes later, as Brienne was putting the final touches on the lion sigil she was going to upload into the game’s supply shop, she saw a flurry of alerts pop up on her phone. She was being tagged in post after post on the boards and the WeirChat servers.

_OMG that video! Where’s @BrienneWesterlands?_

_No @BrienneWesterlands?_

_Someone come get this man @BrienneWesterlands_

Brienne drew a deep breath and clicked on Jaime’s video.

He was sitting in the storeroom, on the poor coffee-stained couch, with the fluorescent lights cranked all the way up. Luckily, he had positioned his phone camera so that none of the disarray of their possessions all over that room were visible. Unluckily, he had positioned the camera so the lens was scarily close to his face, with his forehead partially cut off. 

“Hey, everyone!” Jaime said into the camera, his eyes taking up entirely too much of the screen. “Jaime Lannister from Westerlands Games here. Just want to thank all of our volunteers for the excellent work they’re doing. Last night was the first since all this started where no one died! In the game, I mean. I’m sure there were deaths somewhere. That’s life, isn’t it?”

 _Oh god,_ Brienne thought. 

But then Jaime pulled the camera back and his face came back into focus with all its dazzling proportions. He smiled charmingly at the camera. “Anyway! That’s all due to the volunteers helping us out to keep the Realm safe. My friend Brienne—she’s the new designer we brought on for 2.0; really talented—is dreaming up a token of appreciation for you as we speak. We hope to see you out again tonight. We’re close to solving this mystery and getting things back to normal and your support is so important to making it happen. Thanks a million. Stay cool and stay safe!”

 _It could have been worse_ , she mused. And he did say those nice things about her, which there was no reason for him to do. Then again, it could have been better. Less reflecting on the nature of human mortality. The fans didn’t seem to have a problem with it, though.

 _Rock on! Thanks, dude!_ wrote one user, who from his profile picture appeared to also wear his hair up in a bun (though he didn’t pull it off as well as Jaime did.) 

_Oh hey there @jaimelannister! I’ll help you any time._ A woman, predictably. Brienne fought the urge to downvote the comment.

“Good, right?” Jaime asked when he settled confidently back into his seat, arms up behind his head. “Think it gave them a boost?” 

_Certainly gave our female fans a boost_. “Yes, Jaime; it was lovely.” 

“I do think it was missing one thing,” Jaime said.

“Oh?”

He whipped out his phone, a smile bursting out on his face. 

“No,” Brienne said, staring at him in horror.

“You guys were looking for Brienne,” Jaime said. “I found her! Hard at work, as usual.” 

Was he filming? He was _filming_! She flung her hand up in front of her face to block him. “Jaime! Stop!”

“Sorry, folks—she’s too cool to be in my videos,” Jaime said.

“I’m not ‘too cool’,” she protested. “I just don’t—are you still filming?”

“Shhh,” Tyrion said sharply. He and the others were all facing the glass side of the suite, huddled close together. 

Jaime quickly said goodbye to his video audience and slid the phone back into his pocket.

“You’re right,” Addam said, leaning forward. 

“Fifth time today,” Jon added.

“Sorry—what’s going on?” Brienne asked.

“Sunspear,” Tyrion explained. “They’re on the prowl. We’ve seen Oberyn Martell working in the conference room across the hall, Ned Dayne taking phone calls outside the men’s bathroom, and Ellaria Sand just keeps walking by.”

Jaime stood up to look out the window behind them all. “No Bronn?”

“Maybe he’s busy,” Brienne said. _Busy hacking our game_ , Jaime’s glance back at her said.

A few moments later, there she was again: lithe little Ellaria, dressed in loose, flowy green culottes and a white crop-top tank that showed off her flat abs. _Gotta make all that time in the gym worth it, I guess._

Jaime matched forward and pushed Jon out of the way to pull open the door. “Hey!” he called down the hallway after her. “Ellaria! You lost? Maybe we can help.”

She spun on her heel and looked up, raising one perfectly sculpted, dark eyebrow at Jaime. “Jaime Lannister, is that you, in the office? I thought you were just a figurehead.”

He leaned against the door frame, arms crossed and eyes narrowed. “Thought I’d put my education to good use, such as it is. But then, you know that already, don’t you?”

Ellaria walked forward, hands on her hips. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh, come on,” Jaime laughed, mirthless. “We know you’ve been watching us grapple with all this bullshit with glee. Whoever’s hacking us knows the OS inside and out. Like they used to work here. Like they helped build it.”

Ellaria pulled out her phone from the pocket of her voluminous pants. “That’s a very serious accusation,” she said, frowning as she typed something out on her phone. 

“We know,” Tyrion interjected, poking out the door next to Jaime. “We might have to take this to a serious lawyer for a serious look at pressing serious charges.”

“I really take offense that you think so little of our integrity as a company,” Ellaria said.

“Then we’re on the same page,” Jaime replied. “That’s wonderful to hear, Ellaria.” He said _wonderful_ like an insult, like spitting out glass.

“Fuck,” Addam grumbled from his position on the floor. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Brienne jumped up to see what was going on. On his screen, weaving in and out of view of the sandstone skyline of Old Coast City, was the dragon and its mysterious cloaked rider.

During the day.

The carnage was unfathomable. Players ran screaming through the streets. Charred bodies hung out of blackened windows. Smoke billowed into the air.

The dragon landed on top of the Great Sept, its head arching upward in a threatening growl.

Brienne gasped. Jaime and Tyrion turned toward her.

“Dragon,” Jon said, darkly. Tyrion’s face paled. 

Ellaria stepped back. “Looks like an emergency.”

A smug grin spread slowly across her face. 

“Best of luck,” she called, walking away.

In the Westerlands suite, the door closed, the team looked at each other grimly. 

This was war.

* * *

  
That night was another sleepless one. Jaime didn’t even try to cajole Brienne to bed. They chugged coffee. They downed DragonFire energy shots. Brienne’s blood felt like acid one minute and fire the next. 

All night, the city burned.

There wasn’t time to answer all the pleas for help. Sam’s inbox hit capacity. The best they could do was put out reassuring messages on the WeirChat servers that help was on the way.

They split the city into quadrants among the six of them. Anyone still in the city who needed help was instructed to meet them at the checkpoint. Armed with the God’s Protection, the Westerlands staff led them along the charred streets under the cover of darkness, outside the city walls to safety. From there, volunteers helped to shepherd them into the green hills, out of sight.

As the sun rose blindingly over the office, Brienne was surprised she was still upright. Exhaustion had ebbed away somewhere in the night, replaced by a weightless buzzing in her head. She felt jittery, the room all sharp edges, moving too quickly around her.

She left her lady knight idling in the Realm and made her excuses to leave the suite. To stretch her legs. To get everyone a pitcher of water. To get herself a drink of water. Mostly, though, to get out of that room.

The air outside in the common areas hit her with a cool, antiseptic blast. The suite was a warm bubble of bodies, the smell of sweat mixing with leftover coffee. It was a relief to be away, even surrounded with the sharp scent of Lysol and bleach.

She ambled over to take a pitcher off the shared shelf in the kitchenette to fill in the sink. The water poured smoothly out of the tap, dripping soft cold rivulets onto her arms. She was so absorbed in savoring the change in scenery that she didn’t notice the water quickly rise to the top of the pitcher and start flowing over the rim. 

“I think it’s full,” a man chuckled. She looked up. Across the room, leaning around the ping-pong table, was the bright-eyed and fresh-faced staff of Sunspear Labs. Oberyn Martell, square-jawed, showing off his well-muscled arms in a dark blue polo shirt. Ellaria Sand, casually draped in swathes of black fabric and a smug smirk. A man she could only assume to be Ned Dayne, short and sandy-haired, in faded cargo pants. 

“Tired?” Ellaria asked.

Brienne briskly shut off the water and poured a little off the top of her pitcher. “Did you relocate to this floor? Seems a little early to decamp for a game of ping-pong.”

“Nonsense,” Oberyn said. “A little physical activity is good first thing in the morning. It wakes your brain up more than caffeine.”

Ellaria picked up a paddle and tapped it on her palm. “Care to join us? We could play a great game of doubles.”

Brienne didn’t know the first thing about playing ping-pong or tennis or any game with nets and balls. Any other time, she’d have politely declined and marched back to the suite to keep working. But she was out of sorts today. Her defenses were frayed and her mind already strange and reckless.

“Fine,” she said, abandoning the pitcher of water in the sink.

She took up the empty space at the table next to the quiet Ned Dayne. 

“Your serve?” she asked Ellaria.

The woman smiled and tossed the small white ball in the air. 

The game moved quickly. Brienne felt constantly on the edge of losing control over her serves; only luck was keeping her volleys from shooting far over her opponents’ heads or sputtering out halfway into the net. Ellaria announced the score cheerfully each time, her rich voice ringing out across the room.

A few strikes in, it occurred to her somewhere in the back of her mind to start trying to get something useful out of this. “Where’s your designer?” she asked. “I’d love to meet the famous Bronn Blackwater.” She knew the swarthy man she’d seen in the one picture on all his sparse social media profiles hadn’t shown his face as blatantly as his coworkers for a reason. 

“He’s busy,” Oberyn shrugged, lobbing the ball her way. _Busy burning down Old Coast City_ , she thought

Someone whooped behind her as she dove to parry the ball back. She missed. It rolled across the floor behind her. Dozens of feet lined the kitchenette as she turned to pick it up. She felt her face grow hot; sweat dripped inelegantly down her chest. 

A hand reached out to pass the small white ball back to her. She lifted her head.

Jaime.

“Kick their ass, Warrior,” he said.

“I probably won’t,” she admitted. “I’m barely hanging on.”

He laughed. “At least make them work for it.”

She took the ball and returned to their table. _Make them work for it._ That she could do. 

Ellaria got the next serve. It was a softball; Ned batted the ball away easily. Brienne knocked the return hard at Oberyn. She did it again the next time the ball came her way. And then next. And the next.

Her arm was getting sore. Her energy was starting to lag. The next serve her way almost snuck past her, again. 

“I think we’re wearing Brienne out,” Oberyn called over at Ellaria. She tipped her head back and laughed.

Brienne smacked the ball as hard as she could, directly at Ellaria, still laughing. It snapped up and hit her between the eyes. She reeled back, pressing her hand to her forehead, all her ironic smiles and flashing eyes fading away in shock.

“Checkmate,” she said, tossing the paddle down to the table. 

Jaime fell in step beside her as she retreated back to the kitchenette. At least the crowd had dwindled to only two or three other people, all of whom pretended to be getting coffee. She could tell he was smothering a laugh. “Did you just yell ‘checkmate’ at the end of a ping-pong game?”

“I’m too tired to think of a clever quip,” she replied. She lifted the jug of water from where it still sat in the sink, untouched. “Get us some cups, and let’s get back to work.”

* * *

  
Brienne was sure she hadn’t been in the kitchenette for long, but the office suite had, in the interim, completely transformed. 

Opaque white shower curtains hung along the glass-walled facade. When Brienne stepped inside, she could see they were held in place by a complicated web of removable adhesive hooks and curtain rods at the juncture of the wall and ceiling. The purpose was clear, and quite cleverly so: to prevent any prying eyes from seeing what they were up to. 

Gilly waved cheerfully from the center of the room, where she stood next to a garbage bag full of what Brienne could only assume were their empty DragonFire energy bottles and cardboard coffee cups. The room smelled miles better with the trash packed up. Though, that might have just been the pair of essential oil diffusers that were now stationed on opposite ends of the suite, puffing up misty clouds of lemongrass and mint.

“Just thought I’d pick up a few things at Bed, Bath, and Beyond for you guys,” Gilly explained, cheerfully flicking the switch on a noise machine near the door. “It’s awful what those folks at Sunspear are doing.” She clapped her hands happily at the sight of their water pitcher and glasses. She’d brought them her special vegan power muffins, but staying hydrated was the most important thing to do when under stress. 

“These muffins are delicious,” Jaime said, before he even finished his first bite. “I’d even say they are the most exciting—“

“Any change?” Brienne asked Jon loudly. 

He pulled off his headphones and squinted up at her. “What?”

“The dragon. Still at it?” 

He nodded grimly. “Old Coast City is basically a ruin. It’s like a dystopian horror movie. I don’t think there’s anything we can do on the ground about that.”

She felt her stomach sink. Maybe a full shutdown and reset would be the only thing they could do. 

“Don’t look so glum,” Tyrion interjected. “He said there’s nothing we can do from the _ground_. We plan to attack from the sky.”

“How?” she asked. “We don’t have a dragon in 1.0.”

“But we do have a dragon,” Jaime said from behind her. “We have yours.”

Tyrion showed her his laptop. The code he created to put the dragon into 2.0 was up on the screen. He had adapted it as a patch into the current operating system, he explained, and had the graphics uploading as they spoke. It 

“Want to do the honors when it’s ready?” he asked, a wry grin on his face.

An hour later, Brienne became a dragon. 

In some ways, it was pretty ridiculous. The color display was higher for 2.0, so the shades of lavender and violet on this particular dragon flattened to a slightly medicinal lilac. The softer look for 2.0 clashed comically with the harsh realism in the current game’s design.

And yet: it was still magical. The dragon could fly, swoop, and roll in the sky high above the Realm. It could breathe fire and roar just as menacingly as the hackers’ dragon. As Brienne soared down to the fields just beyond the walls of the smoking Old Coast City, she could see the characters played by her coworkers look up at her in awe.

A loud screech shook her from her reverie. She was not here to play. She was here to battle the invading dragon. 

She barreled toward the other dragon. A jet of fire narrowly missed her wings. She spun to attack from below; it twisted away. They lunged. They sniped. They traded bouts of fire and smoke. 

Finally, she had the dragon and its rider squarely in her range. She belched a long stream of fire directly at them both, holding it for as long as she could. She pulled back, expecting the dragon to fall to the ground—charred, injured, riderless.

The other dragon was unhurt. So was the hooded, blue-eyed man on its back. If it weren’t for the streaks of black soot on the dragon’s flank, Brienne wouldn’t have even known she had just attacked it with a powerful blast of flames.

Her opponent took advantage of her shock and rushed forward. He slammed into Brienne’s dragon, flinging her with force to the ground. She saw the meadow rush up to meet her on her screen. The players on the ground scattered as she came plummeting toward them, the other dragon’s fire raining down onto the indiscriminately.

“I’m burning!” Addam gasped, as his character flailed, cooking and smoking in his suit of armor. “On complete fucking fire! I thought you guys put the Gods’ Protection on us this week!”

“You have to do it over again every day,” Sam reminded him gently, and Addam groaned.

Brienne’s dragon lay motionless on the green grass. Even though it was just a game, she felt tears pricking her eyes. How could she have let the dragon get hurt? How could she have failed?

She dropped her head into her hands. She couldn’t even find it in herself to be flustered when Jaime put his hand sympathetically on her back.

This was war, and they were losing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tell me your favorite bit of 08.03 shade in the comments :)


	5. Reinforcements

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She should feel more excited. Instead she felt slightly nauseous.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Rating That Was Promised

For the first time since the hack began—and perhaps even since she started at Westerlands, if she was being completely honest—Brienne lingered in bed after waking, unable to will herself to get going. 

The dragon had been a bust. _Her_ dragon had been a bust. It had looked cartoonish in the battle and hadn’t left a scratch on the enemy, Never mind that there was never any guarantee that it would work—she hadn’t designed it to battle demon hacker dragons that no one knew anything about. Still, the failure bottomed out the confidence she usually had about her work, and all that she had left hanging in her mind were leftover strips of doubt. 

“If you hit snooze on that alarm one more time, I’m going to toss your phone into the sea,” Jaime mumbled from his position on the couch. That wasn’t fair. She’d only hit snooze once. Also, it was a terrible threat. The sea was miles away.

Jaime poked her on the shoulder. “You ok down there? I can tell you’re awake.” 

Brienne covered her face with her hands. “I’m not awake. I’m still sleeping.”

He laughed, softly, but didn’t say anything more. Brienne closed her eyes and let the pitch-black darkness of the room envelop her once again. She drifted, alarmless, back toward the edge of sleep. She was vaguely aware of Jaime rustling around, pulling on his clothes and slipping out the door. _I really should be up, too_ , she thought, before nestling back down under the blanket. Jaime Lannister _can’t be getting to work before me._ But she couldn’t bring herself to do it, not right then.

When she finally did wake up again, it was almost lunchtime. Brienne raced to the office sporting yesterday’s clothes and acute morning breath, a bolt of guilt coursing through her. 

The whole suite turned to look at her when she burst through the doors. 

“So sorry, everyone— _Tyrion_ —I overslept,” she blurted out.

“Oh, no problem,” Tyrion said mildly.

“Here, Gilly brought us more of those energy bars,” Sam added, pushing a small paper plate toward her.

“Uh, thanks,” she replied, taking the plate. She sat down at her usual spot, at the long desk under the window. Next to her computer was a wrapped bagel and a damp plastic to-go cup of iced coffee. She looked over at Jaime, seated in the spot next to hers, typing intensely. “Are these yours?”

“Of course not.” He didn’t look up from his screen. “Sorry if it’s a little soggy.” 

The others were all watching her. It made her a little uneasy. Had Jaime said something about her being in a bad mood? She took a nervous sip of her iced coffee.

When she opened her email, she knew instantly that wasn’t what motivated the outpouring of affection from her colleagues. There were hundreds of notification messages: from Twitter, from WeirChat, from the boards. Her heart raced as she scrolled through them.

_@BrienneWesterlands what happened?_

_Did @BrienneWesterlands die IRL? lol_

_Hope your dragon is OK @BrienneWesterlands!_

Not everyone was concerned about her. _Of course @BrienneWesterlands dumb-looking dragon couldn’t beat it,_ one guy said. _This is what happens when you leave a woman in charge of game design_ , said another. 

That last guy had earned himself an angry reply from Jaime. _Listen @redronnet if you keep talking I will build a trebuchet and personally launch your character into a castle wall!!!_ he’d written. Jaime seemed to have spent the last hour going after every dude on the chats and boards who insulted her. One he threatened to throw into a dungeon for a year. Another guy he suggested was one word away from being beheaded in front of the whole Lannister army.

“Are you still replying to them?” she asked under her breath. Her face was hot; her whole body was much too jittery for so little coffee.

“Some people need additional reminders,” Jaime muttered. “This Red Ronnet guy especially. I’m five seconds away from asking him to meet me out back to throw hands.”

She put her head in her hands. “Jaime, I appreciate it—but please stop helping.”

“I'm just defending your honor!” he protested.

There was, at least, one good thing that came out of this particular bout of public shaming: it gave Jon an idea about their next line of attack. “Do you think we could make some sort of trebuchet?”

“Not to attack your harassers,” he added hastily, upon looking over at Brienne. “But to launch a weapon to take down the hacker’s dragon.”

Brienne didn’t have much expertise in designing weapons. Her background was in interactive character creation. But Jaime, used to high fantasy video game debauchery, jumped to attention. 

“Like a Dragonpiercer?” he exclaimed. Tyrion and Addam clapped their hands with excitement.

“Sorry, a what?” asked Sam.

“In Dances with Dragons,” Jaime explained. “If you get enough gold—like serious, top player-level gold—you can buy the ultimate weapon to take down other dragons.” 

“It’s like a harpoon, but made of dragonglass—much cooler,” added Tyrion.

Jaime brought up pictures from the internet of the Dragonpiercer and they all crowded in to look. It was certainly menacing. The player hoisted a giant crossbow to their shoulder and then launched the black-tipped arrow into the competing dragon’s belly while on dragonback. The result was a visual horror—the dragon’s jaws gaping in pain, blood and guts in the air, the opposing player’s terrified plummet to the earth. 

Brienne wasn’t excited to create an instrument of death, even a fictional and temporary one. But the stakes were high. Her team needed her. She opened up her tablet and got to work.

Accuracy and beauty weren’t the objectives. It could have been a stick figure version of a crossbow as long as it got the job done (without violating copyright.) Yet the online critics rankled her. She wanted to knock them all into the dirt. Her best design work was going to save the game and they were all going to regret their vitriol. 

A couple of hours later, Tyrion and Addam had the code ready to test and Brienne had the design to code in. Everyone held their breath as Tyrion gifted his character what they were now calling the Dragonspike and wandered into a thicket of tall trees. He lifted it to his character’s shoulder, pulled back the string, and released.

The arrow landed in the center of a thick three trunk with a satisfying _thwack_. They all cheered.

They offered to let Brienne take the weapon on dragonback. “A rematch,” Jaime said, a savage and mischievous glint in his eyes. But she couldn’t do it. Even with the Gods’ Protection, the thought of tumbling with her purple dragon to the ground again turned her stomach. 

Tyrion boarded the dragon instead. His character, small in stature like him in life, gripped the Dragonspike in one hand and the spikes along the dragon’s back in the other. They all crowded around him and Jon—one screen to follow the action from up in the sky, and another to watch it from below. 

Now they just had to find the dragon.

Sam and Jaime were on it. Users had been logging its progress via the boards and service complaints all day. The hackers had grown bored of burning down Old Coast City. Instead they turned to razing the villages and fields to the north, leaving blackened crops and singed treetops in the dragon’s wake. 

“According to this, the dragon is resting on the shores of The Dreadful Lake,” Jaime reported. Brienne hated that name. She’d lobbied to no avail to get it changed to something less depressing for 2.0. 

Tyrion and Jon both raced for the lake, the former on Brienne’s dragon and the latter on horseback. Tyrion reached it first, of course, and as he breached the clouds, it was clear that the users were right: the cloaked hacker and his dark dragon perched on the rocky edge of the lake, incongruous in the late afternoon sunlight dappling the Realm.

Tyrion swooped, and both looked up. Brienne’s dragon breathed a warning shot of flames over their heads. 

The hooded figure boarded his dragon. It spread its wings and arched its head back, shooting a column of fire up into the sky in reply.

Then the hackers’ dragon soared up to meet theirs. The two creatures stared at each other for a long moment. Sizing each other up. Plotting. Counting down: on three.

The other dragon lunged first. Tyrion leaned out of the way of its flames and rose higher. They snapped. Dove. Arched. Rolled. Tyrion hadn’t gotten close enough to take a shot at the other dragon yet. He gritted his teeth.

“Watch out for the folks on the ground,” Jon warned. On his monitor, Brienne could see faces poking out from the trees all around the lake: users gathered to watch the fight.

“Fuck it,” Tyrion grunted. His character aimed Brienne’s dragon at the other one and sped up the chase. He lifted the Dragonspike into place, aimed, and fired. 

It caught the hackers’ dragon right between the ribs with a sickening crunch. The creature roared in pain and plummeted down to the lake, hitting the water with a thunderous splash. It wasn’t deep enough to swallow the dragon’s body entirely into its depths; its head and the tips of its wings poked out into the air as it thrashed. 

Tyrion circled lower, searching for the hooded rider. They needed to get close to him to crack him. They needed to capture him. Then this would all be over.

“There!” Jaime shouted. He jabbed his finger on the screen. In the wake of the temporary ripples he left in the monitor, Brienne saw it too: a figure climbing out of the water onto the shore, clad only in black. 

Tyrion spun Brienne’s dragon around and bore down on the hooded man. He broke into an otherworldly fast run, hurtling toward the thick treeline of the forest straight ahead. 

There was no way that he could outrun Tyrion, on dragonback, but he was making a good contest out of it. 

Out of nowhere—a dark shape streaked out of the trees. It hurtled down to the hooded man. They collided. Two figures. The hooded man crumpled to the ground. And the other—in a flash, it was gone.

“What the hell was that?” Jaime asked. He turned to Brienne. “One of the volunteers?”

She shook her head. She’d left them all stationed by the river with Sam, keeping an eye on the marching knights as they trampled their way slowly along the countryside.

Tyrion landed the dragon on the clearing and his character dismounted. The hooded man lay motionless, his hood askew and his piercing blue eyes starting at nothing. Tyrion punched out a code on his keyboard; GOD MODE flashed onto the upper right corner of his screen. He typed again. _Disabled_ , the alert read. 

Addam grabbed his laptop. His character had still been stationed on the hill by the zombie army, keeping watch. But now there was no zombie army. They had all fallen to the ground when the hooded man did. 

Sam lifted his laptop up, too, giving a thumbs up. The knights were gone. Just a single suit of armor remained, piled in a body-less heap on the ground. 

Jaime whooped and punched the air. Tyrion and Addam exchanged a high-five.

“Who do you think it was, though?” Brienne asked.

“Who the fuck cares,” Jon said. “ I need a nap.”

* * *

Brienne leaned against the stone exterior of their WeWork in the cooling night air. With one hand, she held a metal tin of salty food-truck fries. With the other, she was indelicately shoving the fries into her mouth. It was late, definitely past 11 o’clock. On the sidewalk in front of her, people milled around in the bluish Friday evening light, exiting from bars and restaurants to hail cabs and rush down to the subway. A train rumbled under her feet as the traffic light at the intersection turned. 

It was over. Brienne was giddy with how fast they mopped up the damage. After freezing the hooded character, Tyrion traced the IPs the user had been on—one out in Flea Bottom, and one linked to their WeWork. It was enough proof for Tyrion to be extremely smug. “And Blackwater lives in Flea Bottom,” he crowed. “They’re extremely fucked.” He blocked both IPs and then printed off reams of evidence to bring over to the Lannister lawyers.

Despite his proclaimed need to sleep, Jon spent his afternoon running tests on the patch he’d designed for the back-end vulnerability that Bronn had exploited to get into the game. Everyone else worked on restoring people’s castles and character purchases. Recruits flocked to help match players missing their characters to the undead bodies now lying out in the field in a big heap. There was a whole disturbing channel in WeirChat dedicated to in-game missing-persons photos that Brienne was happy to see disappear. 

By the late evening, they had almost everything back on line. Some of the Old Coast City was still uninhabitable, but Sam convinced them to temporarily relocate users so they could pick back up on repairs after the weekend. When the clock finally hit ten, Tyrion sent everyone home. “Sleep! Be merry! For victory is ours!” 

“I’m just doing the sleep one,” Jon mumbled as he grabbed his things and stumbled out the door. 

Addam had ordered them all another round of Pentoshi food, but Brienne was still ravenous, like the mental anguish of the last few days had drained all her energy stores and her body was just picking up on it. Jaime waved off her offer of street truck food. He was still deep in conversation with their volunteer army, posting photos of the headless corpses that had yet to be claimed by their users. While she was in line, she contemplated just buying him a thing of fries and shove it under his nose, like he did with her. 

Instead, she sent him a flurry of play-by-play pictures of her snack via text. _You’re missing out_ , she wrote. _They’re going to be cold_.

After an agonizing minute he replied. 

_Seen too many cartoon undead to want to eat ever again_

_You enjoy for the both of us Warrior_

Out in the evening breeze, she didn’t feel her cheeks heat up again, though she knew they must be glowing. Away from the haze of the past few days, she could more easily face what that meant. The heat in her skin when he focused his attention on her. The racing in her veins when he was just merely close. A crush, she thought. Because of proximity. And the iced coffees. He was gorgeous, and infuriating, and always in reach. Of course she felt things. It was normal. If any of the other Westerlands staff was into men, they’d probably feel it, too. Nothing special. 

Jaime was waiting for her in the storage room when she finally made her way back. She’s half-hoped he would be and half-hoped he wouldn’t be. He sat on the floor, back up against the couch, legs across the air mattress, looking at something on his phone. The glow of the screen was warm on his face in the dark room, setting the angles of his face into brilliant, mysterious relief.

“Thought for a second that you went home,” he said, a smile on his face.

Brienne laughed and collapsed back onto the mattress, her legs crossing over his. She left her bag and shoes discarded sloppily at the door. She was too tired to even change into pajamas. “I think I would fall asleep and end up at the Lion Gate,” she replied.

Jaime set down his phone and stretched out beside her on the mattress. It really wasn’t big enough for both of them; the whole side of his body touched hers.

“There is another place to sleep in this room, you know,” Brienne chided. Her heart wasn't in it, though.

“Too tired.” His lips were dangerously close to her ear; each word vibrated all the way down her spine. “You smell like fries.”

“You snooze, you lose,” Brienne muttered. He chuckled, so close—damn him. She let herself sink into the warmth of him next to her. A blanket that wasn’t hers, that no one would notice she was borrowing here, just for a night. She was too tired to fight off the feelings.

* * *

Brienne didn’t set an alarm. She slept until she wasn’t tired anymore. Until her eyes were no longer heavy. A strange feeling, to wake

up solid and rested instead of forcing herself up, jagged, against her will. 

Though maybe that was just the feeling of warmth all along her back and Jaime’s arm thrown across her waist. Solid. 

He didn’t realize. He didn’t mean to do it. If she moved over he’d roll onto his back and not know anything about this. She could feel her morning relaxation fade into stiffness. She didn’t want to move an inch. Instead she lay there, a statue, his arm at her waist, eyes closed in an excruciating limbo.

Her phone buzzed in her backpack. Tyrion had left her a long message: the whole staff was invited to a night on the town to celebrate the end of the attack. They already had gotten good press. He’d planted stories of corporate sabotage and of their heroic deeds. Someone had interviewed a bunch of the volunteers. Maybe 2.0 will have dragon tourneys! After he hung up, he called Jaime and told him the exact same things. Brienne didn’t just imagine this. She heard it all, because Tyrion was in the office. He was making all the calls pacing the length of the back hallway, just feet away from where she lay.

The door to the storage room rattled. Tyrion swore. She could hear him rattling around in his pocket for his keycard. 

Brienne pulled on Jaime’s arm. “Tyrion’s here,” she whispered. “We have to get up.” All she got was a muttered reply. He didn’t even move his arm. She tried pulling harder.

Tyrion pushed the door open. Her bag, still on the floor, slid back, a very poor doorstop. 

The lights flickered on. Jaime shot up to sitting, his arms quickly withdrawing to his sides. He blinked at his brother’s open-mouthed stare. For a moment, the three of them were frozen in place.

“It’s not what it looks like,” Jaime said finally, straightening the blanket over his lap. Brienne wanted to just pull it over her head and pretend none of this was happening.

“Like you’ve been living in here?” Tyrion replied, eyebrows raised “I kind of figured. Cersei said she hadn’t seen you in months and you’ve worn the same four t-shirts over and over again. Now the one thing I hadn’t guessed was—“

“I’ve been living here too!” Brienne interjected quickly. “We just fell asleep.”

“Ok, whatever you say.” Tyrion grinned at his brother. “Check your messages! Tonight’s gonna be legendary.”

Brienne sunk her face onto her knees. There was no need to hide, though—Tyrion had already closed the door, leaving them in the darkness. 

“Tonight?” Jaime asked.

Brienne kept her face down. “He’s throwing a party for us. Some bar on the waterfront.”

He shifted away from her. Her cheeks burned.

“I should go and get ready,” she mumbled into the ground. If she could even work up the courage to go.

* * *

Outside of Renly and Loras’s place in Silk Heights, Brienne took a deep breath. For a split second, she wished she’d taken Jaime up on his offer to come with her, when she said where she was going.“Reinforcements, remember?” he’d said. “You need reinforcements.” She hadn’t even really given him a reply. The whole point was getting away from him. She grabbed her backpack and pretty much ran to the elevators. 

_This can’t be worse than riding the subway for forty-five minutes with Jaime after being caught cuddling with him by her boss_ , she thought. Was it just her imagination or did he tighten his hold on her when she first tried to wake him up?

She turned her key in the lock and climbed the stairs.

The TV was blaring in the living room, a cooking competition. The volume was high enough that she was certain that they didn’t hear her come in. Maybe she could just stay in her room and watch police procedurals on her laptop all night. Then she wouldn’t have to face Jaime, her face on fire, or Tyrion, with his smug knowing smile. What did he know, even? There was nothing to know!

Brienne set about restoring order to her bedroom. Her plants were staring at her wearily from the windowsill; she rushed to water them, almost apologizing for being away so long. She’d left her laptop and tablet charging in the office suite, she realized with a wince. If she was going to curl up here and forget about Jaime, she’d have to do it with her phone for entertainment. _I could read a book_ , Brienne thought desperately, looking over at the three physical books on her narrow dresser that she had brought with her to King’s Landing and had already read.

Why should she, though? Why should she let Jaime and his brother ruin the night for her? Wasn’t this her celebration, too?

 _I can just not talk to him_ , she decided. For all she knew, Jaime wouldn’t even go. And surely Tyrion—he could be professional. He cared about inclusive workplaces! He wouldn’t dare to make comments about her sex life. Of which there wasn’t one. 

She lay out a pair of jeans and a loose-fitting grey t-shirt on her bed. A relaxed outfit for a relaxing night out. The plants were already perking up. She grabbed her towel off its hook on the back of the door and set out for the shower. 

_It is nice to get ready without flip-flops,_ she thought as she shampooed her hair. Renly and Loras probably cleaned the bathroom more than the staff at the WeWork did. And she could use her own body wash! It was depressing how much she appreciated basic perks of living in a real home after a few weeks of crashing in a supply closet. 

The cooking program was still blaring as she made her way into the hallway, wrapped in her towel and bathrobe. She really was going to get away with not speaking to them! It was a miracle sent from on high.

“Brienne!” Renly said from the kitchen as she passed by. “We’d been wondering where you’d got to!”

So much for that.

She backed up slowly to the kitchen door and put on a cheerful smile that she hoped didn’t look forced. Renly was dressed in his usual perfectly pressed checkered polo and shorts, leaning against the oven in a red apron. “Oh, you know, work’s been busy,” she mumbled.

“Do I ever,” he laughed. She looked for a hint of malice, but he didn’t seem angry at all. He flashed her his perfect white smile. When she first moved in, she had chastised herself for being dazzled by it. “I’ve felt so bad being caught up with work myself, especially since”—he lowered his voice conspiratorially—“Loras’s cat finally kicked the bucket.”

Brienne swallowed. “I-I didn’t...I mean...I’m really sorry. Ser Peaches was—“

“Oh, Ser Peaches was horrible. Loras got him in college as a rescue. He only mellowed in the last year, and that was mostly because of the cancer.”

“The cancer?”

“I know—it’s terrible, to see pets suffer,” Renly said. “Poor Loras, finding him dead in our room like that. I wish I had been here. He’s in a better place now, though. Did you know he was 17 years old?”

“I didn’t,” Brienne replied faintly. _In their room?_

“What’s going on with the appetizers?” someone said from behind. Loras. He pushed past her, like she was a piece of furniture, and walked over to peck his husband on the cheek. “Oh, hi, Brienne,” he added, nonchalantly. “We’ve missed you. We’ve been wondering where you’ve been.”

Brienne stared at the alien life form that was Loras Tyrell. Not one week ago he had basically chased her from the apartment. “You’ve missed me,” she repeated.

“We both did!” Renly chirped. Loras nodded silently.

“So you aren’t still thinking that I—that Ser Peaches—“

“Nope!” Loras replied quickly.

Renly tightened his arm around Loras’s waist. “Poor Ser Peaches. He had a good run.”

“Renly mentioned you had him since college,” Brienne said, “and that he had cancer. _And_ that you found him dead in _your_ bedroom. I was surprised to hear that.”

Loras kept his gaze on the floor and didn’t look up.

Renly turned to look up at Loras. “What’s going on here?”

“Nothing,” Loras replied, still looking down.

“Not nothing, Loras!” Brienne was shocked at the volume in her own voice. “You found Ser Peaches dead in my bedroom, not yours, and the first thing you said was ‘what have you done’! I was afraid to even show my face here. I thought I had accidentally poisoned him with my plants!”

Renly gasped. “Loras! We knew Ser Peaches only had a few weeks left.”

“It just—“ Loras took a shuddering breath and his face crumpled. “It just seemed so sudden! And with me losing my job at the restaurant and you being gone all the time working, he was all that I had! We wouldn’t even need to have a roommate living in his old room if it weren’t for me. I uprooted his whole life and then he died” Tears were rolling down Loras’s face.

“Lor, have you been seeing your therapist twice a week like we talked about?” Renly had his hands on both sides of his sobbing husband’s face. Neither of them were paying any attention to Brienne anymore. She slunk away down the hall and into her room.

 _I have got to get out of this apartment. S_ he hastily pulled on the clothes she'd laid out on her bed. Hair still wet, she grabbed her bag and ran out the door. She didn’t even bother to lock up behind her.

  
  


* * *

The sunset streaked orange and pink across the sky as Brienne walked the several blocks from the subway to the River Gate waterfront. This close to the coast, in the ruins of the old city wall, the ground wasn’t suitable for an underground train. Until a few years ago, it didn’t matter. The area had been all warehouses. Brienne had never been to any of the trendy new bars that had popped up on the waterfront here; even though it wasn’t too far from her office, she hadn’t the time or the excuse to go. 

She should feel more excited. Instead she felt slightly nauseous. She’d spent the last few hours after fleeing whatever it was that was going on with Loras and Renly pacing around downtown King’s Landing. She ate a sandwich from a deli on the steps of the Great Sept at Baylor, watching the tourists take photos and teenage girls gossip. Alarmed by the decidedly unphotogenic look of her feet in sandals in the daylight, she’d wandered the streets looking for a nail salon, ending up somehow in a tiny place in Flea Bottom wedged between smoking hipsters and an overpriced tattoo parlor. The pedicurist had tried valiantly to start up a conversation, but Brienne was too busy staring forlornly at the other women in the shop. Thin, petite, with perfectly fitted clothes and purposely mussed hair. Brienne had grown used to being tall. She’d grown into being both ungainly and substantial, thick waisted and long-legged. She’d gotten used to being quirky. Herself. But she’d never be a King’s Landing girl. She hadn’t asked where Jaime lived, when he wasn’t hiding in the storage room at their WeWork. Did he live in Flea Bottom, surrounded by trendsetters with french manicures and slender thighs?

Tyrion had a reservation for the whole Westerlands team at a place called the Blue Pearl. It was a beer garden right on the waterfront, with beach sand spread out on the pier like a carpet. Light-up plastic sofas and benches surrounding covered fire pits dotted the surface. Brienne could hear Addam’s laughter booming echo across the water as she approached. Instead of joining them, she slipped into the tiny bathroom, a white-washed wooden shack under a wide lantern-lit tent next to the bar. After her pedicure, she’d ducked into a little clothes boutique, rifling through for something cuter than the drab gray t-shirt she’d left her apartment in. She’d settled on a flowing black tank top, mostly because the shop attendant had said she looked good in it when she popped out of her dressing room to peer in the mirror. The woman had strong-armed her into a different bag, too--a big emerald-green faux leather tote into which she could conveniently tuck her whole backpack and unwanted shirt.

Now, though, she just felt stupid. _I don’t even look good in this and that woman totally played me_ , she thought, pulling the new shirt over her head and replacing it with the gray one. That one didn’t look great either. It was wrinkled from being shoved into her new bag. She swapped it back. She should have gotten some lipstick while she was out, too. A few months doing nothing but work and she was completely lost at how to prepare for a social gathering.

An irate pounding at the door jolted her. The black was going to have to work. She grabbed her bag and braved her way out into the bar. 

The Westerlands team waved her down as soon as she set foot into the crowd. They’d commandeered a set of three couches around a firepit at the far end of the sandy deck. Gilly from the snacks startup next door perched on the edge of a sofa next to Sam, smiling brightly in a blue-and-white striped sundress. Jon and Addam leaned toward the firepit, chatting animatedly. Tyrion had two women in stilettos and short skirts giggling at something he said on their other side. Jaime, despite their attempts to draw him into the conversation, sat across from his brother stiffly. He turned to face her as the others waved, a half-smile on his lips, nodding in greeting. Brienne fought her blush and nodded quickly back, diverting her eyes over to Gilly instead. 

“We were worried you weren’t going to show,” Addam said when she reached the group. 

She stopped on the end of the longest sofa, standing next to Gilly, and put down her bag. There was space on the couch between Jon and Jaime, but she’d burst into flames if she had to take it. 

“I love your shirt!” Gilly said. Brienne smiled back in thanks. 

Jon handed her a plastic cup of beer. “Here,” he said. “You like beer, right?” She took a sip and gave him a thumbs-up, even though the beer itself wasn’t great, a little watery, with an aftertaste somewhere on the rubber-band spectrum. 

Brienne’s beer took the last of their pitcher, and Jon excused himself to get up a new one. She tried to sit up on the arm of the couch by where he had been sitting, like Gilly was, but she slipped back way too much on the smooth light-up plastic and ended up giving in to sitting in Jon’s spot instead. Jaime sat on the other end watching her, his arm extended out on the top of the sofa in that relaxed way that some guys did when they were trying to take up space. She was glad she sat just outside his reach.

“How was your day?” he shouted over the sound of the rest of the bar.

“Oh, fine,” she shouted back. 

He tipped his head toward her. “What?”

“It was fine,” she yelled again.

“What?” 

For God’s sake. She slid over on the couch a bit to lean closer. “I said it was fine,” she said. “I went to my place to change and then walked around a little.” 

He raised his eyebrows. “And that was fine? Your place?” 

She laughed into her beer, involuntarily. “Well, it was not what I was expecting.”

Jaime was smiling that half-smile again. She already had leaned too far into his sphere of influence on the couch, almost up to the elbow point of his arm.

“The cat apparently had cancer,” she said. Jaime burst out laughing. 

“His owner didn’t even tell his husband about any of it! He straight-up lied about where he found the cat.” Jaime was doubled over now, hysterical. Brienne couldn’t help it; she was laughing too.

“Honestly,” she said, “if you had been there, you would have thought I was completely nuts up until the guy started crying and his husband asked him about therapy.”

His face grew more serious. “I wouldn’t have. I would have given that guy a piece of my mind. Who the hell does he think he is, threatening you one minute and then being all nice when his husband is watching? You should have brought me.”

“I should have, if only to have witnesses,” Brienne said, wiping a tear of laughter from her face. “But it was fine. It could have been so much worse.”

“Please,” Jaime said. “This is sociopath territory. Who knows what could happen next time? You need to get out of there before he accuses you of killing a cat he doesn’t even have.”

Brienne didn’t want to admit that she could see it. “You’re right.” She didn’t like admitting that, either.

Jaime pulled out his phone. “I’m sending you the number for my landlord,” he said. “He has a couple of new buildings he’s trying to fill. Maybe he has something for you.”

The phrase hit her like a splash of water from the Blackwater Rush behind them. “Your landlord.”

He ran his hands through his hair, a bit less confident than he’d been. “That day, after the ping-pong match with Oberyn—you pointed out I wasn’t living the life I wanted to live. Remember?” She barely knew him then, dragging him out of the building before he could cause a scene. Saving him from himself the way he’d done for her, in a way, with the snacks and the mattress and the gentle prodding to act like a functional human. “I sat there after you left, stewing over it. I did that first night, too, when you threw me off the couch. You were brutally honest, but you were right. I had to get my shit together. So I found some studio apartments online and made some appointments. I signed the lease Monday.”

“But you’ve been sleeping in the office this whole time,” she said.

He shrugged. “I haven’t had time to deal with moving, with the hack and everything.” He grinned. “Plus my roommate is much better here.”

Brienne felt her face heating up at that. She downed the rest of the rubber-band beer in her cup, though it didn’t cool her down at all. “I could come with you, if you want. When you get your stuff.” _It’s only fair to return his offer_ , she thought.

“You don’t have to do that. My sister’s...a lot. I think I might go tomorrow, anyway. Don't want to take over your Sunday.”

“I’m free tomorrow,” she replied, too quickly. “Besides, what is she going to do to me? I’m six feet tall. She can’t push me down the stairs.”

He smiled his half smile and shook his head, chuckling. Not in refusal, though, she didn’t think. Her heart had been pounding waiting for him to respond, she realized. One beer and she was rushing headlong into stupid things. “Reinforcements, right?” she said, catching his eye and smiling back at him.

“Reinforcements,” he echoed, smiling. “Ok. If you’re not too hungover, that is.” 

Jon reappeared with the new pitchers of beer then, a different flavor with more hops that he told them all was much better because he wasn’t as cheap as Addam. Despite the hops, it went down smoother too. They poured themselves round after round, toasting to Westerlands Games, to HeroAge Adventures, to their mysterious savior, whoever he was— _bold of you to assume it’s a he,_ Brienne had chastised—and to their dragon, for saving the day. They griped about the Sunspear antics, the probable lawsuit; they traded ideas for the next phase of progress on 2.0 when they got back to the office. Jaime made a video at some point, after beer four, for their volunteers. She slid further into the territory of his arm to lean in and wave, aware of every inch of him behind her, growing closer to her on the couch. 

Gilly bent down to hug her goodbye as she and Sam made their farewells. The lit-up couch across the fire was empty; Tyrion and his ladies must have taken the party elsewhere at some point. The sound of Jon and Addam’s video game chatter had faded away too. More beer appeared in front of them, on the table on the edge of the firepit. Jaime didn’t like this flavor, but they both still drank it.

“Not rubber bands this time, at least,” she mused out loud. More fruit. Lemons? Lemongrass? Jaime spit out his beer with laughter.

“I’ve been saying that pilsner tastes like rubber for years,” he said. “But everyone told me I was wrong, so I’ve just been ordering it like once or twice a month, to see what it was that I was tasting.”

“You’ve been drinking beer you hate on the regular to see if you still hate it?”

“Basically.” They were both laughing again, close on the end of the couch. His hand rested lightly on the back of her shoulder blade. The cool breeze off the water ruffled her hair as their laughter boiled down to a simmer, leaving something warm softly bubbling in her chest. 

“Are you cold?” Jaime asked. He tapped his fingers along her upper arm. If there hadn’t been goosebumps there before, there were now. 

“Not at all,” she said. The glowing sofas around on the patio seemed to twinkle like stars in her softening vision. In Jaime’s eyes, the flames of their firepit flickered. 

“What would you say if I tried to kiss you?” he asked.

“If you—” She swallowed. “You really want to?” On her mind was the night after the movie theater. His hands on her waist. An accident. She had put her hands on him too. Not an accident, she realized. Very much on purpose.

He chuckled again. “Of course I do.”

“I don’t think I’d say anything,” she replied. “We’d be kissing. I’d—I’d be kissing you.”

The hand that wasn’t on her back came up to touch her face. “Good,” he said, and he leaned forward to press his lips onto hers. 

Brienne hadn’t kissed anyone for a while. Westerlands Games had been her whole life since she moved to King’s Landing, and in Oldtown she had stopped using her dating apps after a terrible night with a sloppy, handsy guy named Owen. Jaime was neither of those things. He was firm and deliberate, his hands confident in her hair, on the slope of her neck, on the small of her back. She found herself pressed against him—solid, like this morning—breathing in the scent of hops and cinnamon and the sea on his skin.

His hand traced the skin under her shirt, up the blades of her spine. Their angle on the plastic sofa was impossibly biased in his favor; her hands were trapped between them, only one free enough to even rest on his waist. She could move, she thought, pull him back onto her, feel his skin, too, but she was too distracted by the maddening intensity of his mouth on hers. 

He pulled back; she made to chase him, but his hands held her in place. “Can I walk you home?” he murmured in her ear. 

“Silk Heights is far.” She felt the puff of laughter in his chest under her own.

“Last I heard,” he said, his finger tracing circles on her back, “you had a crash pad downtown.”

They left the rest of the pitcher of beer on the table, untouched. She let him lead her by the hand away from the laughter and the music and the flickering lights. At the crosswalk over the River Expressway, she drew him closer and kissed him as they waited for the light to change, cars roaring past. _What a relief not to bend down!_ She laughed at that as they ran across the street, hands still clasped together.

The WeWork wasn’t far, she didn’t think, but the walk back seemed to take forever. The streets were more winding in this part of town; darker, too, with all the new businesses closed for the weekend and for the night. Jaime was no skilled navigator, either. He pulled her to him at the traffic-less crosswalks; he kissed her up against the cool stone buildings, around corners, down narrow side streets.

“Where the fuck are we?” he asked, his lips trailing down her neck.

“I thought you knew,” she breathed out, laughing even though his hands, resting at the clasp of her bra, the bone of her hip, were a very serious matter. 

On the next street they found a cab. The driver, a young Qarthi guy with a backwards baseball cap, laughed when they told him where they were going. “That’s only a block away,” he said.

From there: the slamming of the car door behind them. Bright lights in the white marble lobby— _Tarth marble?_ —and a Dornish security guard dozing at her desk. The soft whoosh of the elevator doors, the cold brushed metal on her back. “I’ve always wanted to make out in an elevator,” Jaime said, moving in to do just that. 

The ninth floor was quiet, dimmed lights, no parties. Jaime got the hang of navigating _now_ , past the humming locked-down offices, past routers and charging electronics twinkling like fairy lights. 

At the storeroom door, he leaned back to pull her inside, and she got the last glimpse of his face in the light: a smirk on his ruddy lips, daring, inviting, and just for her.

The door clicked closed behind them. In the dark, she pulled him on top of her. His hands on her waist, tracing down. Her hands on his back, touching skin. 

_I’m just going to go for it_ , she thought, as though she wasn’t already there and urging for more.

* * *

Brienne woke up fuzzy, heavy-headed, and _cold._

She reached for the blanket. 

She was naked.

She sat up, squinting, her eyes adjusting in the dark. 

Next to her was Jaime. On his stomach, head turned away from her. 

Also naked.

She stared down at the grayish outline of his bare back, the curve of his bare ass, his bare feet hanging off the end and corner of their shared mattress. 

They were both naked. In the office. Together. 

The night before came to her in flashes, each image in time with the pounding in her head. Kissing on the light-up couch by the water. _In public_. Her face flamed. His hands on her skin. The cool stone in the alley. The elevator. And then in the dark: her shirt over her head, his bare chest sliding down hers, his head between—

_Oh fuck._

She stood, shivering. On the ground, Jaime slumbered on. Did she just get drunk and have sex with Jaime? At work? 

Her foot brushed a soft bit of denim. Her pants. She found her bag and shoes at their usual spot, dropped unceremoniously at the door. She had to get out of here before he woke up and saw what they had done. _What would you do if I tried to kiss you? I’d be kissing you._ Who says that? It was the dumbest thing she had ever said.

She pulled out her gray t-shirt, dressed quickly in the dark, and sped out the door, heart racing. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't worry, guys--this is a romcom, remember?
> 
> PS: the beer that Jon brings is based on Brooklyn Brewery's Stonewall IPA, the only IPA I, an avowed IPA-hater, have ever loved.


	6. Retreat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Do you really not remember? I would have hoped it was memorable.”
> 
> Oh, she remembered: firm hands on her bare thighs; lips moving down her sternum. “I do,” she replied. “It was.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In spite of the horrors of my pandemic depression, I present...content! 🥳

At a round, silver hightop table at Alys’s Cafe, Brienne sat in last night’s clothes, no underwear underneath, vibrating out of her skin. That might have had something to do with all the coffee she’d drank. In just twenty minutes, she had worked her way through most of a medium iced, all on an empty stomach. Her bagel was still in its wrapper, plain-on-plain, toasted, untouched. She wasn’t particularly hungry or thirsty; in fact, she was a little nauseous. Mostly she’d gulped down the coffee to have something to distract herself from all her thoughts. Of which there were many.

It’s not like she hadn’t had sex before. In college, a few years earlier, she’d spent most of a year being unsatisfactorily pawed at by fellow computer science major Hyle Hunt. He’d been too small for the normal size condoms and his bony hips smacking into hers had left her sorer than any actual sexual activity had. 

What she had never had was unplanned sex. With a relative  _ stranger _ . Hyle has been her boyfriend. They had spent a few weeks going to parties and movies together, kissing, easing into it before they got to the step of waking up together without any clothes on. She knew Jaime, sure; she’d been more or less constantly in his presence for the past two weeks. But she had only just met him four months ago, and until that night in the storage room where he literally sat on her in her sleep, she’d only seen him here and there, playing video games in the common room and not acknowledging her. And they’d gone from meeting to kissing to nudity in record time.

She drained the last of her coffee, peeking into her giant purse with trepidation. Inside were two boxes: one of morning-after pills and one of pregnancy tests. The clerk at the drugstore, a young woman with cropped silver-dyed hair and a long row of piercings covering each ear, had taken pity on her shaking hands at the self-checkout and rang them up for her. This was such a mess. One night and she’d alienated her coworker and might possibly be carrying his unwanted child. Not to mention STDs. She hadn’t seen him having sex with anyone during the weeks they’d been sharing the storage room, but who knows what he had gotten up to. For all she knew, he was popping out for Tinder hook-ups during lunch!

The Alys’s cashier’s raised voice distracted her from her spiraling anxiety. “Oh, your girlfriend’s over there,” the woman said, pointing in her direction. She was the same doe-eyed ponytailed brunette that almost always worked the morning shifts. Standing at the register was a tall man in a fitted pink t-shirt and a dark green baseball hat. Brienne’s stomach dropped. Even in jeans she knew that rear end too well from this morning. 

Jaime turned. They locked eyes. His face went blank and she felt her stomach plummet even more. 

“Hi,” she said, awkwardly, pulling her bag closed and nestling it tightly onto her lap. Her voice was barely a whisper.

“You already ordered,” he said. In his fist, held two bagels, wrapped and squished together. In the other, a to-go tray with two iced coffees.

“It’s a cafe,” she replied. 

He put the food he was holding down on the table next to hers, but didn’t sit down. His hands gripped the back of the high-backed chair across from her and fixed her in that emerald gaze of his. 

“Brienne,” he began.

“Don’t worry,” she blurted. She lifted the plastic bag from the drugstore out of her purse. “I’ve got it covered. Morning-after, and, um, tests, you know. And I’m—I don’t have anything. So you—”

“Brienne. Stop. We didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

He chuckled and looked down at his hands. The nerve of him. “Didn’t do anything that requires those things. Close to it, though. Do you really not remember? I would have hoped it was memorable.”

Oh, she remembered: firm hands on her bare thighs; lips moving down her sternum. “I do,” she replied. “It was. I just thought—maybe there were parts I forgot.” Her face must have been aflame enough to set off the sprinklers in the ceiling. She wanted to crawl into the shopping bag next to her apparently useless morning-after pills and never emerge again.

“Is that why you ran out on me? 

“No.” A lie. “Maybe. We’re co-workers! We’ll see each other every day! We shouldn’t be getting—involved.”

Jaime was looking down at his hands again. “I don’t think there are any policies against it. Technically. I’d know. Operations Warrior and all.” He looked back up, his green-eyed gaze unbearable as it caught hers. “And we’ve been seeing each other all day, every day already. Hasn’t been a problem for me. I’d say quite the opposite, actually. But perhaps—it’s not—for you?”

Well, it had seemed like a problem. An embarrassment. Letting this flirty, attractive, vexatious guy get under her skin. She liked him. More than liked him. Wanted him. It was humiliating. But only if she was alone in it. Which, if she looked into those eyes, burning and pleading and beautiful, like the rest of him, it didn’t seem that she—

“Oh,” she said. She wasn’t alone. “Not in that way. In the way that I had to—ignore it, I guess. I wasn’t thinking that it would be—this. That. Last night. You too.” Could she say any more of a ridiculous assortment of words?

Jaime smirked. “It is. Could be again.”

She felt her face flame up again. Embarrassment or something else. She couldn’t tell. Maybe a mix of the two. “Are you sure? You barely know me. Each other, I mean. We barely know each other. What if—”

“Stop.” Jaime finally sat down at the table. “I’m sure. I know you enough to want to know more. And if”—here he waved his hands in the air, gesturing something intangible between them—”we’ll figure something out. Okay?”

“Okay,” Brienne said stupidly back. “So is this just—last night? Or?”

“Or?” Jamie grinned. “Both? Why not?”

Brienne grinned back. “Okay.”

“Great,” he said. He motioned down at the assortment of bagels on the table. “I should eat. I have to pick up the truck in less than an hour.”

“The truck.”

“You don’t remember?” Jaime’s mouth was full of chocolate bagel. “To go get my stuff.”

Vaguely. Was that before the kissing? She had a sense that maybe it was. She had told him a story. The cat! And Loras, breaking down. You should have brought me, he said. Or something like that. And she agreed to go with him for his own confrontation. She won’t throw me down the stairs.  _ How smooth, Brienne _ , she thought.  _ Remind him of how you are more giant than the sweet and delicate girls he has (probably) previously surrounded himself with _ . 

It was clear that she had been lost in thought for some time. When she looked up from her own breakfast, Jaime was staring at her quite nervously. “You don’t have to go, of course,” he said, his voice oddly neutral.

“Of course I will,” she said quickly. His whole body relaxed. “It’s just...I need to go back upstairs. I rushed out of there. I’m not even wearing underwear. Who knows where in the room it even is.” This last part she said in a hushed whisper, leaning over the table, her eyes darting from side to side.

Jaime chuckled. “Is that an invitation?”

Brienne reached out to swat him on the arm. “I thought we had to pick up a van.” 

He just shrugged. That smile on his face: deadly. “In an hour.”

* * *

They only got a little distracted. Brienne loathed having to be the spoilsport, but if Jaime got his way helping her find her stash of clean clothes, holding her up against the wall while she took off her jeans—well. They’d never get anywhere.  _ After this weekend, we absolutely cannot do anything remotely sexual in this office _ , Brienne vowed as they walked the few blocks over to the rental company. She was already going to struggle not having erotic associations with metal storage shelving after having used one to hold herself up as Jaime eased her clothing down her body that morning. 

Jaime was in an unusually boisterous mood as he drove the van out onto the road. He turned up the radio and sang along to one top 40 song after another, drumming on the steering wheel and taking the turns on the very busy street with a casual nonchalance. Brienne sipped at the giant water bottle he’d given her and tried not to grimace or hold onto the edge of the worn upholstered passenger seat too tightly as whipped around each corner. The drive itself wasn’t too long; the scene out the windows was basically a guided tour of the city. The Old Keep, high above the skyline out her window. The Dragonpit. The Great Sept. They passed slowly down a long tree-lined side street. Visenya’s Hill, they called this part of town. The oldest of old money lived here. Probably a Targaryen or two on this very street. Jaime came to a stop in front of a row of gorgeous three-story buildings built out of the same pink stone as the Red Keep.

“Here we are,” he said, angling the van into a parking spot halfway down the lane. Brienne stared out at the buildings. Bay window after bay window. Wide stone steps leading up from manicured sidewalk gardens to ornate, heavy-looking doors. A few of them sported stained glass panels on their first floor. 

“Which apartment is yours?” Brienne asked, as Jaime led her up the path to a row house somewhere in the middle of the row. It was one of the ones with stained glass. 

“We have number 448,” he replied, pointing ahead. “Single family. My father owns the building. We have to pay for the maintenance and upkeep on it. The roof, the gardens, the plumbing. Keep it in good condition for us to eventually pass along to future heirs of the Great House of Lannister.” 

“That’s  _ it _ ? You live rent free in Visenya’s Hill. With a whole house to just the two of you.”

“Trust me,” Jaime said, “what I pay emotionally is more than I save in rent.” 

He turned his key in the lock and held the door for her to enter. The door knocker, she noticed, was in the shape of a golden lion’s head. The same motif decorated the foyer. Above her head hung a golden chandelier, two roaring lions at the top of a casacade of glittering crystal. Just a few feet across the shiny white stone floors stood a massive dark wood staircase, with a lion’s head mounted on the end of the bannister. 

Jaime noticed her looking around. “The lion features prominently on the family crest. My father loves to put it everywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he has a massive lion tattooed across his chest or something.” 

“A tattoo? Our father? Surely you must be joking.” A woman’s voice. It rang out richly in the big foyer: a sultry, round-vowled chorus. Brienne looked over at Jaime, who was wincing. 

“Cersei,” he said, voice tight. “I wasn’t expecting you to be here.” 

“No?” Cersei floated down the hallway to lean along the wall just to the left of the staircase, arms crossed over her chest. She wore a long black sundress, high-waisted and flowy like an ancient Essiosi princess. “I do live here.”

She craned her neck to get a look at Brienne on the opposite wall, up against the door hinge. It was remarkable how much she looked like Jaime, despite a full face of makeup and rich red lipstick set against perfect white teeth. She even wore her curly blonde hair pulled up in a bun, just like he did. “And here I was thinking you were talking to yourself. Who’s the bodyguard?”

“She’s not a bodyguard. She’s Brienne and she’s helping me get my things today.”

Cersei smirked. “She does look very handy. Very built for this sort of thing. Did you hire her?”

“That’s enough,” Jaime snapped. He stepped forward, towering over his sister. “My—Brienne and I came to pick up the rest of my stuff from upstairs. Why don’t you just go about whatever it is you were doing and leave us alone. I’ll be out of your way permanently in no time.” 

“Permanently? You’re an idiot. This place is prime real estate, and Father lets us live here for nothing. Get off your high horse.”

“I’ll lose my mind staying here any longer. I need my own life.” Brienne wondered if she should maybe go wait upstairs for him, or perhaps even somewhere farther away, like inside the wall, or down the block. 

Cersei slammed her fist on the wall. “I am your sister! Your twin! And you presume to say that I make you lose your mind?”

“Maybe you should spend a little time thinking about who you are outside of those things. It does wonders.” He turned to Brienne, a heavy purse-lipped smile on his face, and gestured up the staircase with his chin. “This way. Sorry.”

She scrambled up after him. Out of the side of her frame of vision she could see Cersei still standing cross-armed and glum below, watching them ascend. Jaime ushered her in through a wide wood-framed entranceway and locked a heavy dark wood door behind them.

“Sorry about her,” he said, again. “She’s impossible.” 

Brienne shrugged and looked around the room he’d locked them into. It wasn’t a single room, but rather a series of them: a large rectangular living room with worn wooden floors and a dusty, unused fireplace serving as a TV stand, and a nook with an unmade bed and dresser tucked behind a glass-paneled set of French doors. A small bathroom, tiled in a violent vintage yellow, sat, door open, off to one side. Aside from not having a kitchen, Jaime essentially had a studio apartment on the second floor. It must have been bad if even that wasn’t enough separation from his sister. 

“Where are your boxes?” Brienne asked, peering around. There was clutter—shoes under the sofa, piles of gaming guides on a side table, a set of empty growlers collecting dust in a corner—but nothing to indicate someone was in the process of moving.

“Oh,” Jaime said, hands on his hips, “I don’t have much, aside from the TV and my computer. The furniture was all Cersei’s from when she had a roommate here.” He truly didn’t look perturbed at all. 

“You have got to be kidding me,” Brienne said. 

“I have a couple of suitcases from when I moved in,” he offered. “We could use those.” 

Brienne sighed. “I guess get out the bags,” she said. 

He wasn’t wrong about having a small amount of stuff, at least. Brienne unplugged and wound up cords and gear from the table serving as Jaime’s computer desk while he dumped his t-shirts and underwear from the dresser along the wall onto the top sheet of his bed. “What? I’ll tie it up and use it as a bag,” he said, in reply to Brienne’s skeptical glare. 

They were on sheet bundle number two (pants, button-downs, and hoodies) when the knocking started. At first it was a set of two sharp raps, spaced a few minutes apart. Then it became sets of two raps, then three.

“Do you...want to answer that?” Brienne asked, tucking Jaime’s DVD player into a suitcase next to his keyboard and an assortment of adapters. 

He shook his head. “Just ignore her. She’ll give up eventually.”

Brienne doubted that. Cersei started yelling as they wedged in socks and shoes on top of the electronics. “Are you going to hide in there like a sullen child?” she shouted. “We are family.”

Brienne looked over at Jaime. He just shook his head again.

“Jaime!” The doorknob rattled with the intensity of each blow. “Open this godsdamned door.” 

Brienne stood up and strode across the room to the entrance. Before Jaime could stop her, she slid the lock over and wrenched the door back. 

In the hallway, Cersei stood at the top of the stairs, red-faced, her perfect hair slipping out of its bun in tiny wisps. She stopped yelling and stared up at Brienne.

“Can I help you with something?” Brienne asked her. 

“I need to speak with my brother,” she said.

“He locked the door for a reason.” 

She tilted her head and smiled at Brienne. Her eyes glittered with derision, a hard glinting look that made her face the most unlike her brother’s as it had “This is a family matter. It doesn’t concern you.”

Brienne looked back at Jaime, tying up the sheets full of clothes and lining them up in the living room next to his television and hard drive. He moved quickly, sloppily, his shoulders tense, his lips so tightly pursed that they basically were non-existent. He didn’t look over their way once.

“He very obviously doesn’t want to speak to you,” Brienne said, shifting in the open space of the doorway to block Jaime from her view. 

She smirked. “Seems like you are a bodyguard after all.” 

Brienne just stared down at Cersei in reply, pressing her hands on the sides of the door and doorframe so tightly that she thought she might lift herself off the ground. Finally the other woman let out a beleaguered sigh, a puff of air mixed with a sardonic laugh. She turned briskly on her heel and stomped down the hall to Brienne’s left. A few seconds later, Brienne heard a door slam in the distance.

Jaime’s hand pressed lightly to the small of her back. “You didn’t need to do that,” he said quietly.

“You really do need a new apartment,” Brienne replied. 

Jaime laughed, shakily, his chest pressing soft against her shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get out of here before she decides to give it another go.”  
  


* * *

Jaime’s new apartment was in Cobbler’s Square, far enough away that it felt less old-money-stuffy but not so long of a slog for Brienne to have to contemplate the heaviness of the moment too deeply. Jaime drove with a new, quiet focus after they absconded from the townhouse in Visenya’s Hill with Cersei watching them from a high-up sliver of windowpane as they departed. He didn’t say a word until the van came to a stop in front of his building. It was a red-toned, geometric new thing, with even rows of big windows lining the smooth front and a neat sunken concrete courtyard just outside the front entrance. 

“Thank you for doing this,” he said. “I’m sorry about everything. I didn’t think she’d—I probably should have warned you.”

“Surely the months of you living in the office instead of that apartment was warning enough,” she pointed out. His response was the first real smile she’d seen in hours, maybe all day, really. The warmth of it on his face knocked her back a little. Had he always affected her like this? 

Brienne volunteered to watch the van while Jaime carted his sheet bundles and electronics inside. Before his first run up, he leaned over to kiss her, his hands sliding soft around her waist. She wasn’t expecting it, out here in broad daylight with all eyes on them, and she jumped a little at the sudden contact. 

Jaime peeled back, eyes wide, and Brienne laughed nervously. “Sorry,” she said, bringing her hands up to grip his upper arms. “New. That’s all.”

He kissed her again. This time she was ready, chasing his lips in turn, running a hand down his back, through the soft hairs on the back of his neck. 

A car honked at them as it drove by. That time, they both jumped. Jaime shook his head, laughing, and told her he’d be quick.

The last thing they needed to bring upstairs wasn’t in the van. It waited for them in the building’s package room: a four-foot high rectangular box containing a mattress from some company called Hvnly.

“I think they lost a few vowels,” Brienne commented, hoisting up one side. She hoped the box was high enough to cover up her reddening face. A mattress. She and Jaime just did  _ that _ outside and now they were carrying up a brand new mattress together.

“They’re probably around somewhere in our WeWork,” Jaime replied from behind the other end of the box.

In the elevator, mattress between them, they didn’t say a word. The numbers ticked off as they climbed higher. On the fifth floor, they awkwardly held the door open as they pushed themselves and the box out into the hallway.

“Here we are,” Jaime said, unlocking the door with a grin. Brienne pushed the mattress box in behind him into a tiny apartment, all shining wood floors and gleaming appliances. A new construction smell permeated the air.

“All yours,” Brienne said, smiling. Jaime looked around the main room, half-kitchen half-living room, and smiled back.

They carried the mattress box into the bedroom, past the wadded up pile of suitcases and clothes-filled sheets in the middle of the living room. Along the outer wall was a four-paned window facing the street. Brienne shielded her eyes against the slant of the late-afternoon sun.

“You’ll have to get some curtains,” she said. Jaime only grunted in reply. He was hacking away at the tape on the mattress box with one of his keys. 

Finally Brienne couldn’t take it anymore. She let the laugh bubble up, into her pinked cheeks. “Sorry,” she said, when Jaime looked over at her, perplexed. “It’s just that—out on the street—they honked at us, and now—we’re here, frantically trying to unpack a mattress—it’s just, kind of amusing.” 

Jaime grinned. “Hold onto the cardboard while I pull it out,” he said. “It’s memory foam and it needs to...rise.”

She did as he requested, and they heaved the mattress out onto the floor. He’d need to get a bed frame, too. Pillows. Maybe some sheets that hadn’t been collecting dust in an unoccupied room for months. 

It was more work than she’d expected to wrest the mattress out. Jaime must have gotten a king sized bed and it was crammed insanely tight into Hvnly’s industrial strength cardboard. They sat down on the ground to watch it slowly unfurl, trying to catch their breath. 

“How long do we need to watch it?” Brienne asked after a few minutes.

Jaime shrugged. He reached out to pull her closer. How odd, how fast her heart was racing. Even though she saw it coming. Jaime took her face in hands and kissed her, slowly. She squinted uneasily at the bare window out of the corner of her eye. 

Jaime laughed and tugged her down onto the mattress. It was already pretty puffy. 

“Are we going to ruin it?” she asked as she slid all the way up onto her back. 

“I have a warranty,” Jaime murmured, his hand skimming along her side. 

“I’m going to be so sore tomorrow,” she lamented. She felt Jaime grinning from where his mouth rested lightly on her neck. “Not like that, you perv.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” he said, his breath grazing her ear. His hand was sliding up her shirt.

“Oh?” Brienne breathed.

“I meant,” he said, tugging off her top and tossing it aside, “that I would help you move.”

Brienne pulled Jaime’s own shirt over his head and pulled him down to her. As their skin touched, as his mouth met hers, she thought, with a thrill, about his words earlier.  _ This is my—Brienne. _ My, my, mine. 

“I’ll hold you to it,” she said, and then she sank back into the mattress, and they stopped talking altogether.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hyle Hunt definitely not based on the guy I lost my virginity to in college, no siree


	7. Victory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Can I ask you a few questions, Ms. Tarth? I know you just got here, but the new look for HeroAge Adventures has been the talk of the night.”

The bells on the door jingled as she stepped over the rough-hewn wood threshold of The Fair Rose, one of several outposts of the Highgarden-themed bistro chain. Long communal tables ran down the center of the room, filled with chatting tourists digging into pastries and young people in hoodies and headphones bent over textbooks with cappuccinos. On the edges of the restaurant, along floor-to-ceiling glass windows, sat heavy wood tables made for two, fresh pink roses in identical blue-glass vases on top of each one. 

It was at one of these tables that Brienne found the person she was looking for, nursing a mug of hot black coffee. She looked just like her social media profile pictures: petite, big-eyed, short hair dyed bubblegum-pink. She gave Brienne a nod as their eyes met; she supposed that she herself was quite recognizable.

Brienne leaned down, extending her hand to the girl. “You must be Arya Stark.”

She raised her eyebrows and smirked a little. “And you must be Brienne.”

“I must ask,” Arya began as Brienne took a seat across the square table from her, tucking her coat on the back of her chair, “how it was that you found me.” 

It certainly hadn’t been easy. After the hackers had been repelled, and the game restored, Tyrion had mused that it would be good to talk to their mysterious savior, if they could find him. Him, they assumed. Whoever he was, Tyrion thought, he had figured out how to track the hackers the best of all. They could use someone like that on the security team. “Not like Jon isn’t doing a great job, of course,” he said. “But there’s something to be said for having an in-game assassin on your side.” 

While Jon and Addam looked at the player logs and security breaches to track the mysterious figure down, Brienne turned to the users. She put out feelers on WeirChat: does this sound like any of your friends? Most people didn’t know, but soon enough, there were whispers. “There’s this one user, NoOne, who was always dead on in figuring out where the lead hacker was heading,” one user said over a direct message. “She kept complaining about missing him, though. Said she was going to conceal herself right behind him and take him out when he wouldn’t see it coming. None of us knew what she was on about. That’s not something you can really do in the game.”

It certainly wasn’t. That made Brienne want to talk to NoOne even more. Lucky for her, she lived in King’s Landing, and after a few rounds of Brienne goading her over private message, Arya Stark agreed to meet. 

“It’s a long story,” Brienne replied, to answer Arya’s in-person question in the spacious bistro. “I followed some rumors in WeirChat. I had a feeling you weren’t a guy. I was pleased to learn I was right.”

Arya grinned. “The others thought I was, didn’t they? Morons.”

Brienne laughed. “Mostly they’re just around too many dudes. But the team at Westerlands appreciates women in tech. My last job was awful. Men rating my appearance on a scale of one to ten. Here they treat me like one of the group, no questions asked. The worst male behavior I have to deal with is some of them forgetting to shower.” And even that had improved—largely due to Gilly hanging around Sam and Jon’s apartment all the time now that she and Sam were officially an item. 

Arya took a sip of her coffee, nodding approvingly. “And the hackers?”

“We can’t disclose who it was, but—”

Arya rolled her eyes. “It was Sunspear. Completely fucking obvious. Their game still isn’t out but they’re showing that same dragon prototype as advertising.”

“Well, even so, there’s no legal case for business sabotage. It looks from the records that it was one disgruntled former employee. Our CEO is investigating personal charges against that individual—”

“Bronn Blackwater,” Arya spat.

“—well, whoever it was,” Brienne continued, slightly rattled by the intensity in the girl’s eyes, “but for now, he—or she—they—are basically getting away with it. Unfortunately.”

“Don’t worry. Those scumbags at Sunspear are going to pay,” Arya said. Her voice was disturbingly nonchalant. She picked up her coffee cup again, looking over the rim at Brienne.

“I hope you mean that metaphorically,” Brienne said. “Karma. Revenge from the universe.”

“Of course,” she said. “It would look bad for a Westerlands employee to go after a competitor.” Arya grinned smugly at Brienne. “That is what you’re here about, right? To offer me a job.”

“I’m here to offer you an interview with our CEO, officially. But I can also answer any questions about the organization if you have them.”

Arya shrugged and downed the rest of her coffee. “Nah. Do you think Lannister would be okay with a delayed start date? I don’t graduate from high school for six more months. I might have enough credits to move it up, though.”

Brienne was glad that this would now be Tyrion’s problem. After months of late nights finishing up the 2.0 design, Brienne was exhausted. 

“I think he’d be willing to discuss it,” she told the girl. “We’ll be in touch to set something up.”

* * *

“Damn,” Jon said as Brienne and Jaime walked into the glass-ceilinged rooftop bar arm-in-arm. They were all gathering here, in the Chataya’s penthouse bar, for the HeroAge Adventures Version 2.0 launch party. Like Jaime, he had actually deigned to put on a blazer and a dress shirt. His hair was even trimmed and neatly combed back from his face. 

For a second, Brienne thought he was talking to her. Brienne looked down at her own clothes, her face flaring up. She had let Jaime cajole her into wearing an actual dress that she had in the back of her closet—a sparkly black thing, clingy and short just by virtue of her height. He hadn’t stopped talking about it since helping her move out Renly and Loras’s place at the end of the summer. “If I take you to a play will you wear it? What about a fancy dinner? What about a fancy dinner in my apartment?” 

That wasn’t it, though. “Looks like you lost,” Addam commented, walking over with a beer in each hand.

“I know,” Jon groaned, taking one from him.

“Lost what?” Jaime asked.

“The bet,” Sam said from behind them. “We had a wager going on when you’d go official.” 

“Tyrion said tonight,” Jon said. “I thought six months from now.”

“I thought never,” Addam said.

“Thanks for your confidence,” Jaime retorted.

“We had Tyrion over for dinner at Jaime’s apartment last week,” Brienne said, confused. “He knew we were officially together.” Had for some time, she thought, remembering his face finding them curled up in the storeroom. Not that she was going to bring that up.

Sam was appalled. “That’s—that’s so wrong!” 

“I’m going to kill him,” Addam said. 

“He bet two hundred dollars!” Jon shook his head. “He’s a liar.”

Gilly leaned over, a full glass of wine clasped in two hands against her surprisingly low-cut velvet top. “He wouldn’t be so naughty if he had a lady of his own,” she said. “After this is over, I’m going to hook him up with my friend Tasha.”

“That will have absolutely no effect,” Jaime assured her. “But please do try anyway.”

A flash went off. Brienne squinted. 

“Sorry,” a small dark-haired woman in a smart blue blazer said. She held a camera on a long strap around her neck. “I’m Meera Reed with _The Raven Magazine_. Are you Brienne Tarth, the Westerlands Design Director? You look absolutely stunning, by the way.”

Brienne couldn’t think of what to say. She was still blinking a little from the camera light. “She is, and she does,” Jaime said, leaning over to shake Meera’s hand.

“Can I ask you a few questions, Ms. Tarth? I know you just got here, but the new look for HeroAge Adventures has been the talk of the night.” 

“Oh,” Brienne said. “Thank you. I guess—sure. Yes.” 

Meera’s face lit up in a big grin. Jaime took Brienne’s coat from her arm and patted her reassuringly on the arm as he walked away. She wanted to pull him back, but she steeled herself, took a deep breath, and turned to Meera to start the interview

Meera was a fan of the game, and had covered the crowd-sourced response to the hack for _The Raven Magazine_ a few months back. She’d loved the infectious energy of the whole group, and the way the female fans especially had rallied around Brienne. “And your dragon!” she gushed. “Was that the inspiration for the 2.0 look we’re seeing tonight?”

Brienne laughed. “Oh no. The vision for the game’s new style had been in the works for ages. I had that dragon design ready for a while before that week. It just seemed the right time to break it in. I’m glad to see it fly free in the update.”

After Meera departed, one last photo of Brienne in the bag, a dizzying line of reporters cycled in to take her place. The Citadel alumni publication was doing a feature on her. The _Kingsguardian_ wanted to ask about her recruitment and working relationship with Tyrion. A dark-skinned woman who ran a King’s Landing gossip blog wanted to ask about her relationship with eligible bachelor Jaime Lannister, heir to the Lannister Family Foundation. 

“Uh, no comment?” Brienne said. She searched over the woman’s head frantically for an escape. Jaime stood near the bar, chatting with pink-haired Arya, who had indeed gotten approval to start just after early graduation, and the new interns, gawky college students named Podrick and Peck. None of them were legal to drink, but they all seemed to be happily nursing green bottles of beer. Probably procured by Jaime, who as the Operations Warrior, was the Westerlands employee most responsible for them all and relished being the indulgent mentor.

“Thanks, but I must go,” she told the woman, whose face fell into an obvious pout. She took the long route around the room to get to Jaime. A beeline to join him would definitely end up in that gossip story. Tyrion, gleefully holding court among reporters himself, reached out to give her a fist-bump as she passed by. A camera flashed as their hands met. She couldn’t get out of the hot zone fast enough.

Jaime passed her the full cocktail that he was holding, something both strong and fruity, when she finally sidled up to him. Arya and the two boys had moved off into their own young person’s circle, laughing over some private joke. “Drink up,” he said. “My father’s working his way over here, and you do not want that encounter to be sober.”

“Did you want another?” one of the bartenders asked, smoothly scooting up behind them. 

Jaime gave him a thumbs up. 

“Is that why you are giving our underage employees alcohol?” Brienne asked.

“Oh, relax,” he said, nudging her with his elbow. “It’s a party.” He put a bill into the tip jar and accepted the replacement cocktail from the bartender. “Great. There he is.” He took a ridiculously large gulp of the drink.

Brienne spotted the source of his distress: a balding man in a tailored suit stood across the room, eyes twitching their way every so often. Tywin Lannister was a distinguished graying man, with the high cheekbones and wry green eyes that seemed to have passed on to all three of his children, in different ways. Brienne wasn’t sure why Jaime felt so sure that he’d ambush them any second. Tywin seemed mainly preoccupied with accepting back pats from other well-dressed men and posing for photographs. Despite that, and even though she knew about the tense relationship between him and Jaime, that Tywin’s opinion of her didn’t matter one single bit, she felt her stomach clench up.

They were given a reprieve from Tywin’s advance, real or imagined, by the drumming of fingers on a microphone. 

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Tyrion said, his voice amplified to drown out all their chatter. “By now I hope you’ve had a chance to grab a glass of champagne from one of our roving bartenders. I mention that because I’m about to ask you to toast a whole lot of people.” The assembled crowd chuckled. “I’m so delighted—nay, humbled—to have the opportunity to welcome you here today to celebrate the amazing work of the Westerlands Games team. You may not know this, but they pulled off HeroAge Version 2.0 in record time, in the face of an unprecedented public hack—all with a staff of just six people.” He raised his own champagne glass out and the crowd followed.

“I’m heartened by the excellent early reviews that our update has gotten. We’ve added new storylines and adventures, created by yours truly. We’ve given the game and all the new characters a brand-new look, designed by the fantastically talented Brienne Tarth.” A bunch of people in the crowd cheered; a few whistled. Tyrion grinned and tipped his glass at her. “And Jon Snow has upgraded our security and customer assurance protocols to make them stronger than ever. I hope the good reviews translate into even better sales, because we just hired Jon a second person for his team. Plus, I know that our CFO Addam was hoping to get a treadmill desk. In all seriousness: thank you to Brienne, Jon, Addam, Sam, and Jaime for all you’ve done to get us to this point.”

Tyrion paused and took a long swig of champagne. “Lastly, I have to thank the Lannister Family Foundation, whose seed funds got us off the ground. My father Tywin Lannister assured me that no nepotism was involved. I’m pleased to announce tonight that Westerlands will be partnering with the Lannister Family Foundation to develop an apprentice program for diversity in tech. These fellows will spend a year working with us at Westerlands, rotating through all of our departments, and the generous support of the Foundation will cover their living expenses and stipend for the duration. As someone who has faced discrimination in the industry before starting my own company, I can’t think of a better way to pay it forward.” He looked over at his father, smiling smugly. “I must thank Tywin Lannister for his continued, unwavering support.”

Brienne guessed by the pinched expression on Tywin Lannister’s face that he hadn’t been informed of this generosity ahead of time. Jaime must have seen it too; she felt him try to suppress a laugh at her side.

They applauded Tyrion one last time, joining him in a final toast to HeroAge Adventures and Westerlands Games. Flash bulbs went off all around them. Her fruity cocktail already empty, Brienne took a glass of champagne from a wandering waiter’s tray. As the noise ascended back to a comfortable murmur, Jaime slipped his arm around her waist. “Here he comes,” he whispered. Tywin parted the crowd like a god diverting the oceans, snaking across the room over to where the two of them stood. 

“Son,” he said, nodding his head at Jaime.

Jaime nodded back. “Father.”

“Lovely party. I’m quite surprised to hear of my apprenticeship program, though. That seems like something you ought to have mentioned.”

Jaime shrugged and took a seemingly-casual sip of his drink. “I thought I did. My mistake. It seems well within the Foundation’s means, though.”

“As the joint CEO, you should have had better control of your brother,” Tywin said, lips pursing in displeasure. 

“You must have figured out by now that Tyrion is much better suited for that work than me,” Jaime replied. “The company is his. It always has been.”

“You really don’t know how to seize value when it’s in front of you, do you?” Tywin sighed. “In any case, it would make us look rather foolish to take it back, now that it’s been announced in a room full of industry reporters.”

“Shame,” Jaime said, grinning an odd, false smile. “Speaking of value right in front of us! Have you met Brienne? She designed all the visuals for 2.0. And we’ve--we’ve been seeing each other for some time now.”

Brienne stuck out her hand for Tywin. He shook it briefly, briskly, and let it drop. “I did assume something of that nature,” he said, gesturing with his eyes to Jaime’s hand on her waist. “Charmed. Do bring her by Casterly sometime. It’s been far long since you’ve visited.” His eyes skipped over their heads and to the rest of the crowd, seeking either a waiter with a fresh glass of champagne or some other source of conversation elsewhere. 

“Well, we won’t keep you, Father,” Jaime said loudly. Tywin nodded at them and turned abruptly on his heel toward the rest of the room. 

“I don’t think he liked me,” Brienne murmured when Tywin was far enough away.

“Nonsense,” said Jaime. “He’s like that with everyone. It’s the Lannister way. Hostility to outsiders. You’ll have to get used to it.”

Brienne leaned closer. “That’s not true of all Lannisters,” she said. She gestured out with her half-filled champagne flute to the knot of people around Tyrion, just to their left. “I find at least half of the ones I know to be quite welcoming.”

Jaime clinked his glass with hers. “To the good half of the family,” he said. “I am in that half, right?”

Brienne tilted her mouth down to kiss him. It must have been the alcohol, to make her so easily brazen. She felt Jaime’s surprise, just one quick second before a grin spread under her lips and then deeper into the kiss.

“Of course you are,” she said when she pulled back. A camera flash went off again, snapping and bright. Jaime looked at her, dazed and admiring, though, and she found that it didn’t matter.

A few hours later, out on the wind-whipped curb, Brienne was delightfully warm from drink and the wool coat she pulled tight around her. Jaime jogged back toward her from the corner, a cab following slowly alongside him. They slid inside along the cold leather backseat, hand in hand. Brienne stumbled a little, ending flopped against Jaime’s warm, solid chest. 

Up front, the driver turned down the jangling rock music from her radio and looked back at them through the cut-out window. “Where to, folks?”

Jaime leaned in, his lips brushing alongside the shell of her ear. “What’ll it be?” he whispered. “Your place or mine?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I started this project back in May, nostalgic for workplaces and the freedom to wander around the city. It was also an experiment to see if I could write something novel-length, though I think I’m still a bit short there. Still, it was so fun to write this and even more fun to have all of you around, following along! Thank you all for being a bright spot in this weird, grim year. It’s been about one year since I started writing and posting fic again and I’m so thrilled to have found this great community at just the right time.


End file.
